https://www.newsweek.com/we-have-some-questions-vivek-ramaswamy-about-how-he-made-his-millions-opinion-1829438By JEFFREY SONNENFELD & STEVEN TIAN
September 24, 2023
With Vivek Ramaswamy rising fast in the 2024 presidential primary polls, his pre-politics career as a biotech entrepreneur has faced growing scrutiny over allegations of pump and dump tactics. But one crucial part of his past has so far been overlooked: his short but extremely lucrative stint on Wall Street as a hedge fund investor.
Our team carefully mined the Securities and Exchange Commission's filings archives and Ramaswamy's own prior statements to recreate and analyze some of his investment history on Wall Street. What we found was shocking.
While he was at Yale Law School, Ramaswamy also worked for a hedge fund, QVT Financial. In the span of one year, Ramaswamy and his company invested in three companies—Pharmasset, Inhibitex, and Anadys, all firms in the highly esoteric field of hepatitis C treatments within biotech. And they were all acquired in major takeovers, with Ramaswamy fortuitously buying in or dramatically upping QVT's stake right around the time secret acquisition talks began in every case.
(Excerpt)