A thought about Vivek Ramaswamy

Just a stray thought. Of what company is "the scum" a CEO? Some of the following might get a bit complicated. Hold on for the ride.

I call Vivek Ramaswamy "the scum" because of his memorable exchange with Nikki Haley. He said she should keep her daughter off TikTok. She said he should keep her daughter "out of your voice," sounding a bit like Will Smith to Chris Rock. He returned to his trollish ways and she muttered "you're just scum". So he has a moniker for the ages. It looked like he was lucky she didn't ChrisRock his world.

Still, that exchange is not my stray thought for today. I am wondering about the several times he said he would be a great President because he is a CEO.

The Republicans DID have a successful CEO as a candidate for President not long ago. His name was Mitt Romney. His party is rather on the outs with him now.

The scum was never the CEO of a Bain Capital. He was the CEO of Roivant Sciences, a Bermuda incorporated pharmaceutical concern with a distinctive strategy. Roivant was in the business of purchasing patents from larger biotech firms -- patents for pharma products where the research work has been done but where they have not yet been brought to market.

Let's think about this for a moment. You regularly walk past the yard of a neighbor of yours who has more money and better cars than you do. One day you walk past and see a car on the front yard with a sign on it that says, "Car for sale AS IS -- $1,000." Do you want to buy it? The success of Roivant (where "ROI" is said to stand for "return on investment") depends on its ability to buy some such cars in such a condition that they are worth more to it than the $1K purchase price.

But if the Big Pharma concern knows this IP is worth more than its purchase price, why is it offering to for sale? Why can it not bring this car to market itself? Hold that thought. Yes, obviously Roivant is making a risky bet in any such case and it is unsurprising that Roivant has NEVER recorded a profitable year.

What is more puzzling: VR seems to have made most of his personal wealth due to his interest in a company spun off from Roivant, called Axovant. Axovant was a one-trick pony -- it bet everything on the utility of a chemical compound called intepirdine, a treatment for Alzheimer's.

Before clinical trials began, experts were optimistic about intepirdine and VR engineered an initial public offering in Axovant. Axovant's market value soared to nearly $3 billion on optimism. VR sold a portion of his shares almost immediately after the IPO and, voila, a fortune sufficient to finance a presidential campaign was born.

A moment ago, describing the Roivant business plan, I was imagining Roivant as the guy who buys cars AS IS. A risky decision. But in the case of VR's personal decisions with his Axovant stock, VR is on the other side. He is the one trying to sell the car. And he did successfully sell the car, for much more than it was actually worth. He used intepirdine optimism to make a fortune off Axovant.

What happened next? Well ... the buyers of this "car" found they had bought a lemon. Intepirdine failed its clinical trial. The company stock lost 75% of its value as soon as this result was announced. Axovant hobbled a long for a few years. It re-branded itself as a gene therapy concern in 2020. That didn't work either, and the company dissolved formally in April 2023.

I wouldn't necessarily infer from any of this that VR did anything wrong, much less illegal. Still, the savvy necessary to set up a money-loser like Roivant in order then to create a subsidiary like Axovant in order then to pump up the value of its shares on a speculative medical breakthrough, in order then to sell into the optimism and reap a fortune just before the price collapses -- the acumen to do all that is not necessarily part of the skill set of a desirable President.

A Story About Coleridge

This is a quote from a memoir by Dorothy Wordsworth, reflecting on a trip she took with two famous poets, her brother, William Wordsworth, and their similarly gifted companion, Samuel Taylor Coleridge. We sat upon a bench, placed for the sake of one of these views, whence we looked down upon the waterfall, and over the open country ... A lady and gentleman, more expeditious tourists than ourselves, came to the spot; they left us at the seat, and we found them again at another station above the Falls. Coleridge, who is always good-natured enough to enter into conversation with anybody whom he meets in his way, began to talk with the gentleman, who observed that it was a majestic waterfall. Coleridge was delighted with the accuracy of the epithet, particularly as he had been settling in his own mind the precise meaning of the words grand, majestic, sublime, etc., and had discussed the subject with William at some length the day before. “Yes, sir,” says Coleridge, “it is a maj...

Searle: The Chinese Room

John Searle has become the object of accusations of improper conduct. These accusations even have some people in the world of academic philosophy saying that instructors in that world should try to avoid teaching Searle's views. That is an odd contention, and has given rise to heated exchanges in certain corners of the blogosphere. At Leiter Reports, I encountered a comment from someone describing himself as "grad student drop out." GSDO said: " This is a side question (and not at all an attempt to answer the question BL posed): How important is John Searle's work? Are people still working on speech act theory or is that just another dead end in the history of 20th century philosophy? My impression is that his reputation is somewhat inflated from all of his speaking engagements and NYRoB reviews. The Chinese room argument is a classic, but is there much more to his work than that?" I took it upon myself to answer that on LR. But here I'll tak...

Recent Controversies Involving Nassim Taleb, Part I

I've written about Nassim Taleb on earlier occasions in this blog. I'll let you do the search yourself, dear reader, for the full background. The short answer to the question "who is Taleb?" is this: he is a 57 year old man born in Lebanon, educated in France, who has been both a hedge fund manager and a derivatives trader. He retired from active participation from the financial world sometime between 2004 and 2006, and has been a full-time writer and provocateur ever since. Taleb's writings for the general public began where one might expect -- in the field where he had made his money -- and he explained certain financial issues to a broad audiences in a very dramatic non-technical way. Since then, he has widened has fields of study, writing about just about everything, applying the intellectual tools he honed in that earlier work. As you might have gather from the above, I respect Taleb, though I have sometimes been critical of him when my own writing ab...

Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

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