It was a foregone conclusion that after doing so well in the first GOP primary debate Vivek Ramaswamy would be attacked and here it comes.
The young, conservative Republican candidate made quite a stir during the debate. Fox News was quick to point out that he recounts a rags-to-riches story on the campaign trail which is true. Ramaswamy says that his parents immigrated to the US with nothing. And that is where the attack comes into play with the media outlet using public records to allege that he is being less than honest.
“I’m not a politician,” Ramaswamy proclaimed as he made his opening remarks at the Fox News-hosted debate in Milwaukee. “I’m an entrepreneur. My parents came to this country with no money 40 years ago. I have gone on to found multibillion-dollar companies.”
He would claim later in the debate that he “didn’t grow up in money.” The definition of what coming from “money” actually means is being parsed here.
Ramaswamy’s claims he came from ‘no money’ clash with prep school upbringing https://t.co/rLox8LamZO
— Fox News Politics (@foxnewspolitics) August 25, 2023
Fox News reported, “Ramaswamy, 38, was born in 1985 in Cincinnati to V. Ganapathy Ramaswamy and Geetha Ramaswamy, who were upper-caste Tamil Brahmin in India. Both parents were highly educated professionals in India before they made the decision to move to the U.S. and start a family.”
Both of Ramaswamy’s parents were educated. That does not mean they came here with money when they immigrated to the United States.
His father was an engineer and his mother was a doctor. His father brought his degree with him and his mother already held a medical degree in geriatric psychiatry from Mysore Medical College & Research Institute in India by the time she arrived in 1985. She obtained her license to practice in Oklahoma less than six months after that according to state records. She obtained her Ohio medical license the next year which is still active.
Ramaswamy wrote in his 2022 book “Nation of Victims” that when he was in sixth grade his father had been working as an engineer at General Electric for the past 20 years, or since about 1976. He would go on to earn his Ph.D. from the University of Cincinnati while still working at General Electric in 1985, according to details in his father’s dissertation. In 2000, his father started working as a patent attorney at General Electric.
He said his family came from no money when they got here
— Babs was right again…. (@patriotbabs11) August 25, 2023
The year that happened, Ramaswamy’s mother immigrated to America, and Vivek was born that August. His birth was followed by his younger brother Shankar.
Fox News is reporting that Ramaswamy went to a prep school. He has written before that he came from a comfortably middle-class family. Today’s cost at the Cincinnati school runs $16,000 a year. Both parents who ostensibly came here with nothing were making fairly good money by that time but that doesn’t mean they were wealthy.
“His parents also apparently established a stock portfolio for him that was bringing in hundreds of dollars in dividends before he graduated high school and thousands by the time he attended Harvard, according to his 2002-2004 tax returns, which he released in June,” Fox News reported.
Somehow, working hard and using your money wisely is being demonized here it would seem.
Many prep schools offer scholarships to poor immigrants.
— Spot Cole (@SpotCole) August 25, 2023
The multimillionaire millennial built his companies from scratch when he had nothing. According to Forbes, he is now worth $950 million. He derives most of his fortune from the 10% ownership stake in Roivant Sciences, the biotechnology firm that he founded in 2014. He also founded an “anti-woke” index fund, Strive Asset Manager, which was recently valued at $300 million according to the New York Post.
“I didn’t inherit anything,” the 38-year-old mogul noted in an interview with ABC News. “I built the companies from zero to nothing. My parents came to this country with no money.”
(Video Credit: ABC News)
Fox News Digital reported earlier that Ramaswamy was already a millionaire by the time he accepted a Soros-family scholarship he previously claimed he needed in order to pay for law school. The scholarship was for $90,000 from the Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowship for New Americans, which was founded by Daisy and Paul Soros, the late older brother of liberal billionaire financier George Soros. When that happened, it was almost a certainty that Ramaswamy did not even really know who George Soros was.
Ramaswamy also claimed that he “didn’t have the money” to afford Yale Law School after attending Harvard. That remains to be seen, but just a note here that you can appear to be a millionaire on paper and not have money available to you.
“There was a separate scholarship that I won at the age of 24-25 when I was going to law school in my mid-20s, in my early 20s, when I didn’t have the money and it was a merit scholarship that hundreds of kids win, that was partially funded, not by George Soros, but by Paul Soros a relative, his brother,” Ramaswamy contended according to Fox News.
“And to be perfectly honest with you, I would have had to be a fool to turn down that scholarship at the age of 24,” he stated.
(Video Credit: Vivek Ramaswamy)
At the time that Ramaswamy accepted the award in 2011, he was already a first-year law student at Yale. He had also reportedly been working for several years as an investment analyst at the hedge fund QVT Financial.
That year, Ramaswamy reported $2,252,209 in total income, according to his tax returns. He reported a total of $1,173,690 in income in the three years prior to that. Again, context is everything here and those numbers quite possibly don’t tell the whole story.
“Vivek won a generic scholarship that hundreds of students win to attend graduate school,” his campaign’s spokesperson, Tricia McLaughlin, told Fox News Digital on Monday in an interview. “It was funded by a relative of George Soros who is long dead.”
“Vivek would have been a fool to turn down that scholarship – Anyone who would have shouldn’t get anywhere near the White House doing trade deals,” she insisted. “In fact, there’s only one candidate that will be on stage Wednesday night whom George Soros has said he wants to win this primary – and it’s not Vivek.”
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