Vivek Ramaswamy Didn’t Just Hype a Drug, He Perfected the Exit
By Brian Allen
Vivek Ramaswamy’s political brand rests on a familiar Silicon Valley myth: the brilliant entrepreneur who built something from nothing, challenged elites, and walked away richer because he was right before everyone else caught up. But long before he entered politics, Ramaswamy executed a far older playbook, one that left pension funds, institutional investors, and ordinary shareholders holding the bag.
The story begins not on a debate stage, but in a biotech prospectus.
In 2014, Ramaswamy acquired the rights to an experimental Alzheimer’s drug called intepirdine for roughly $5 million. The catch was not hidden. The drug had already failed key Phase 2 trials years earlier, missing its primary endpoints. In the world of drug development, that is usually the end of the road.
It wasn’t the end for Ramaswamy.
Through Axovant Sciences, a Roivant subsidiary, the drug was reborn as a “breakthrough candidate.” By mid-2015, Axovant was being aggressively promoted across financial media. Ramaswamy appeared on CNBC praising what he framed as a revolutionary treatment for one of medicine’s most intractable diseases.
“This is the biggest biotech IPO ever,” CNBC’s Mad Money proclaimed in June 2015.
The market responded exactly as intended. Axovant went public at a valuation that stunned analysts. Shares soared above $30, driven less by clinical results than by narrative momentum, the promise of a cure, repeated often enough to drown out the trial data that already existed.
What followed was predictable.
In September 2017, Axovant announced that intepirdine failed its Phase 3 trial. The stock collapsed nearly 75 percent in a single day, wiping out billions in market capitalization. Subsequent trials failed again. The drug never worked. Axovant eventually lost over 99 percent of its value, rebranded, and faded from relevance.
The damage, however, was not abstract.
Institutional investors, including public pension funds, had bought in. Among them was the California State Teachers’ Retirement System, whose exposure would later become emblematic of how aggressively Axovant had been marketed despite its scientific fragility.
Ramaswamy did not share their fate.
Financial disclosures show that he cashed out tens of millions of dollars before the collapse, ultimately extracting roughly $37 million from the enterprise tied to intepirdine and related ventures. By the time the drug failed — again — his personal downside risk had already been neutralized.
This pattern did not end with Axovant. It became a template.
Roivant Sciences, the umbrella company Ramaswamy founded, continued to report massive operating losses, exceeding $1 billion annually in multiple filings, even as its stock remained buoyed by complex financial engineering and institutional backing. Investors were sold the image of a visionary founder battling “ESG elites,” even as the company relied heavily on the same Wall Street capital he publicly denounced.
As Newsweek later summarized in a detailed review of his business record, the contradiction was structural, not rhetorical. The media hype, the early exits, and the residual wreckage followed the same sequence each time.
“Generate media buzz, pull out right before the crash, and leave rubble behind for others to clean up,” the piece concluded.
That history resurfaced recently during a televised exchange that cut through years of self-mythologizing. Journalist Mehdi Hasan confronted Ramaswamy with the Axovant record directly, walking viewers through the failed trials, the IPO timing, and the personal windfall that preceded the collapse.
The facts did not bend.
Vivek Ramaswamy did not invent fraud in biotech. But he refined something more subtle: the ability to sell inevitability, extract value, and exit before reality asserts itself. The losers are rarely visible on cable news. They are pension funds. Retirement systems. Ordinary investors believed the story because the messenger sounded confident and the disease was real.
This is not an argument about ideology. It is about incentives.
When political credibility is built on entrepreneurial success, the underlying business record matters. In Ramaswamy’s case, the record shows a recurring asymmetry: upside privatized, downside socialized. When the science failed, he did not.
The question is no longer whether Axovant worked. It didn’t.
The question is why this pattern keeps being rebranded as disruption instead of what it plainly resembles, a pump-and-exit model that rewards narrative control more than results.
This investigation is part of a larger body of work at The Allen Analysis. We publish document-driven reporting focused on accountability, not access and we don’t stop at the first story.
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