Billionaire Vivek Ramaswamy's fortune hits $2.3 billion as he runs for governor

Vivek Ramaswamy, the Republican nominee for governor of Ohio, is worth an estimated $2.3 billion, Forbes said on Sept. 20, up from $1.8 billion a year ago and about $1 billion in March 2025.

The increase came despite an estimated $1.2 billion of share sales over the past year.

If he wins in November, the 41-year-old would become America's second-richest governor and its third-wealthiest elected official, behind President Donald Trump at $7 billion and Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker, the Hyatt hotel heir, at $4.2 billion.

The fortune rests on Roivant Sciences, the drug development company Ramaswamy founded in 2014 and took public through a special purpose acquisition company in 2021. Its shares trade near $40, close to a record, giving it a market value of about $29 billion. The stock is up 85% this year and worth nearly four times what it was two years ago.

Clinical and regulatory results have driven the rise. Roivant reported Phase 3 data for brepocitinib, a treatment for the muscle disease dermatomyositis, won Food and Drug Administration approval in August for an oral drug called Lisraya, and published Phase 2 results earlier this month for mosliciguat, a pulmonary hypertension compound. A multibillion-dollar litigation settlement with Moderna in March strengthened its balance sheet.

Ramaswamy has been selling into the rally. Disclosures show $106 million of pre-tax share sales in November and December last year and about $400 million in the first quarter of this year. Forbes estimates that if he kept selling at a similar pace, the twelve-month total would reach roughly $1.2 billion. He and his campaign did not respond to questions about his holdings.

The sales have cost him. He owned 10.5% of Roivant after its 2021 listing, about 74.4 million share-equivalents, and Forbes calculates that stake would be worth $2.8 billion today after the cost of exercising his options, $500 million more than his current net worth. Had he kept the roughly 20% he held after founding the company, he would be worth at least $5.8 billion, enough to place him at No. 293 on this year's Forbes 400, alongside the Zoom founder Eric Yuan and the oil heir Gordon Getty.

Ramaswamy took a biology degree at Harvard in 2007 and a law degree at Yale in 2013, and traded biotech stocks at the hedge fund QVT before founding Roivant. He co-founded the investment firm Strive Asset Management in 2022 and ran for the Republican presidential nomination in 2024.

His Democratic opponent, Amy Acton, has made the money an issue, calling him her "self-funding billionaire" opponent and contrasting his travel by private jet with her own Jeep.

Ramaswamy has not tried to play it down. After winning the Republican primary in May he said he believed in celebrating success and pointed out that he had not been born wealthy. "I was not born an anything-aire," he said.