Entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy delighted in a “flood of employment applicants” from competing for asset management after launching a new fund to take on big businesses.
Ramaswamy, a former pharmaceutical CEO who quit due to dissatisfaction with corporate wokeness, just started Strive, an asset management firm located in Ohio that would invest in firms that follow an “excellence capitalism” strategy. Strive will encourage enterprises in its portfolio to pursue increasing profits for shareholders rather than supporting “stakeholder capitalism” and other progressive perspectives.
Ramaswamy remarked on Twitter that “excellent” candidates are already contacting him, per report.
Ramaswamy tweeted, “Really loving the stream of job candidates… including from BlackRock, State Street, & Vanguard who claim they’re ‘fed up’ with the foolishness.” “I’ll give our opponents credit for having impressive backgrounds as well.”
Ramaswamy said that ESG a progressive investing philosophy that stresses “social responsibility” in addition to profitability had no track record of performance in different media outlets. “Despite the assertions made by some of the world’s greatest asset managers and their CEOs, there is no proof that ESG outperforms,” he stated in an interview with CNBC.
“We will tell oil firms to be fantastic oil companies, coal companies to be wonderful coal companies, and solar companies to be outstanding solar companies,” Ramaswamy said in a discussion with The Wall Street Journal.
Ramaswamy claims to have received $20 million in funding thus far. PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel & Pershing Square Capital Management CEO Bill Ackman are one of the investors, according to the Journal.
“The large percentage of Americans want businesses to remain out of politics,” Ramaswamy said. “People want a different area for where they buy, work, and invest from where they cast ballots or participate in political arguments.”
Every Fortune 500 firm is owned by three institutional fund managers: BlackRock, State Street, & Vanguard, on average. The three corporations collectively manage nearly $21 trillion in assets.
Rather than operating under the shareholder capitalism model, which focuses on corporations maximizing profits for shareholders, stakeholder capitalism tries to claim that everyone in the “community” has a say in how a company’s operations impact a variety of issues, from climate change to minority board seats. The theory contends that, for the purpose of broader social good, firms must participate in political & social issues that may or may not be related to their operations – whether or not it helps their shareholders.
Ramaswamy, the former CEO of Roivant Sciences & author of “Woke, Inc: Inside Corporate America’s Social Justice Scam,” detailed how large businesses deceive both liberals and conservatives in an op-ed published last year.
“The strength of this new woke-industrial Leviathan comes from separating us as a people.” When companies tell us what social norms we should accept, they split us into tribes as a whole,” Ramaswamy argued.