Vivek Ramaswamy is worth $2.3bn. A win in Ohio could make him America’s second-richest governor

Vivek Ramaswamy has a rather unusual problem on the Ohio campaign trail: his fortune keeps getting bigger.

The Republican nominee is worth an estimated $2.3 billion, up from $1.8 billion a year ago and just $1 billion in March 2025. That puts the 41-year-old businessman-turned-politician in rare company, which is that, if elected governor in November, he would become America’s second-richest governor and third-wealthiest elected official, behind President Donald Trump and Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker, according to Forbes.

His opponent, Democrat Amy Acton, is making that wealth part of the campaign. She has branded him her “self-funding billionaire” rival, pointing to his private-jet travel while contrasting it with her old Jeep and the financial pressures facing Ohio families.


Ramaswamy has not exactly shied away from the contrast.

“I believe in celebrating success,” he said after winning May’s Republican primary. “I was not born a billionaire. I was not born a millionaire. I was not born an anything-aire.”

The Roivant rally behind Ramaswamy’s fortune

The biggest reason his fortune has ballooned is Roivant Sciences, the drug-development company he founded in 2014.

Roivant shares are now trading around $40, close to their all-time high, giving the company a market capitalisation of roughly $29 billion, according to Forbes' data. The stock has gained 85% since the start of the year and is worth nearly four times what it was two years ago.

A string of developments across Roivant's drug pipeline has helped drive the rally. Phase 3 data for brepocitinib, a treatment for dermatomyositis, boosted the stock last year. The US Food and Drug Administration approved Lisraya in August, while Roivant earlier this month reported strong Phase 2 results for mosliciguat, a pulmonary hypertension drug. A multi-billion-dollar settlement with Moderna in March also strengthened the company's balance sheet.

Ramaswamy has been selling into that strength.

Forbes estimates that he has generated about $1.2 billion from Roivant stock sales over the past year. That includes $106 million in disclosed sales in November and December last year and roughly $400 million sold in the first quarter of 2026. Assuming a similar pace in the following two quarters, Forbes estimates another $700 million could have been sold over the past six months.

Ramaswamy and his campaign did not respond to Forbes' questions about his investment portfolio.

He sold billions. But holding on could have paid more

The exact size of Ramaswamy's remaining Roivant stake is now harder to establish.

At the end of 2025, Ramaswamy and his wife held 61.8 million shares, including 14.7 million in-the-money options that expired in March, representing an 8.7% stake. By the end of the first quarter, their holdings had fallen to 38.9 million shares, with the options gone, taking the stake to 5.4%, according to Forbes.

Once his ownership fell below 5%, and after he ceased being a Roivant officer or director, Ramaswamy was no longer required to report subsequent sales to the Securities and Exchange Commission, the report added.

The result is a much larger cash cushion. Forbes estimates he could now have up to $1.3 billion in cash and liquid securities.

But there's an intriguing twist to the math: selling wasn't necessarily the most lucrative move.

Had Ramaswamy simply retained his Roivant position from its public listing, his stake would today be worth about $2.8 billion, after accounting for the cost of exercising stock options — around $500 million more than his estimated total fortune today.

Go back to the company's founding and the hypothetical gets even bigger. Had he retained his estimated 20% stake in Roivant, Forbes calculates that his fortune would be worth at least $5.8 billion today, enough to put him at No. 293 on the 2026 Forbes 400 list.

Still, Roivant is not the only piece of his wealth puzzle.

Ramaswamy also has an estimated $130 million stake in Chapter, the Medicare-navigation company he quietly co-founded in 2020 while he was still running Roivant. Chapter raised $100 million this year at a $3 billion valuation, double its valuation a year earlier.

So while his wealth has become campaign ammunition in Ohio, the more interesting story sits underneath the billionaire label: a founder who turned a drug company's soaring valuation into a huge cash pile, trimmed his stake along the way and still has another fast-growing private company in his portfolio.