Smart, driven, a little 'arrogant': How Vivek Ramaswamy's Ohio roots shaped him

If you met Vivek Ramaswamy two decades ago in Cincinnati, you might have caught a glimpse of the swagger that carried him to the presidential debate stage in the past month.

Some have found the 38-year-old billionaire annoying. Others like his confidence.

Those in his hometown who knew Ramaswamy as a teenage tennis player, classical pianist and model student fluent in French told The Enquirer the personality you've seen on television and in interviews, as well as his politics, formed in Ramaswamy at a young age.

So his old friends and acquaintances were not shocked when Ramaswamy announced a run for president, though some thought he'd gain fame by winning a Nobel Prize or through his accomplishments in business.

Ramaswamy's upbringing can provide insight into how, in seven months, he's become one of the most talked about Republican presidential candidates not named Trump.

Seven months ago, few knew Ramaswamy, even in his hometown. This is despite the fact he amassed a fortune in the past two decades working as a hedge fund manager and biotech entrepreneur. Ramaswamy currently lives near Columbus.

Since he launched his presidential campaign in February, Ramaswamy has risen in the polls, taken the brunt of the barbs in the first two Republican debates from the other candidates, was declared the winner of the first debate by former President Donald Trump, and even feuded with rapper Eminem, who told him to stop rapping his song "Lose Yourself" at campaign events.

His story begins in a suburb just north of Cincinnati.

'He can come off as a little bit arrogant sometimes'

Those who knew him remembered a brilliant, if sometimes arrogant, child who they suspected would go far. Ramaswamy graduated from St. Xavier High School, a private all-boys Jesuit-run school just west of Cincinnati. He was the 2003 valedictorian at the school, which charges $17,350 a year for tuition today and has graduated a host of Greater Cincinnati business leaders, athletes, politicians and two of the Ohio Supreme Court's seven justices.

His teammates on the St. Xavier tennis team would play a game called "Stump the Vivek," his former coach Russ King told The Enquirer. They would try to trip Ramaswamy up on trivia.

"They thought they could get him on sports, but he was way more knowledgeable on sports than I was, especially like the NBA," King said. "He read the paper even as a young person. The kids, I think they maybe were a little jealous to some degree, and he can come off ... he can come off as a little bit arrogant sometimes."

That's not far off from how Ramaswamy described himself at the second Republican debate.

"You see a young man who's in a bit of a hurry," Ramaswamy said at the debate in response to a question about why he joined TikTok. "Maybe a little ambitious. Bit of a know-it-all.”

He then acknowledged, "No, I don’t know it all.”

Was there hardship growing up?

The roots of his presidential campaign and $1 billion fortune sprout from Evendale, a suburb just north of Cincinnati, in a house now valued at roughly a half million dollars.

"It's an upscale neighborhood," said neighbor Randy Ferchen, 70, a retired mechanical engineer. Sweat poured off his brow and soaked his faded Coca-Cola T-shirt one evening in September as he laid brick pavers on his driveway near where Ramaswamy grew up. He remarked that most of the people in the neighborhood would hire someone to do this. He enjoys it and cuts his own lawn, too. Most of his neighbors hire lawn care services.

"If anything, I'd say I'm one of the poorer people as far as my background. If you ever get hurt here, just roll down the road, you're going to hit a doctor, or lawyer. They're all doctors, lawyers."

In the second Republican debate, Ramaswamy described having "been through hardship growing up." His father, an engineer at General Electric Aviation in Evendale, faced layoffs, Ramaswamy wrote in his book, "Nation of Victims: Identity Politics, the Death of Merit, and the Path Back to Excellence." He stopped short of saying his father was laid off.

"We were a comfortably middle-class family with two incomes, but the threat of layoffs hung over our head," Ramaswamy wrote in his book.

His dad, to make himself valuable to GE, went to law school at night while working in the day and became a patent attorney for the company.

His mother, a geriatric psychiatrist, worked long hours at nursing homes, Ramaswamy said. The long hours forced him to give up basketball, since the practice was too far a drive for his parents to make, he wrote. He took up tennis instead.

Ramaswamy, in "Nation of Victims," mentions his politics were shaped by bullying he experienced. The bullying drew him to "a worldview – and even an identity – that centered on self-reliance rather than dependence."

Ramaswamy singled out one eighth-grade incident in particular. He doesn't mention the school, but according to Enquirer archives, Ramaswamy attended Princeton Junior High, a public school. He said he was rushing between classes "when a big black kid thought it would be amusing to push a nerdy high-achieving Indian kid down the stairs."

Why include the race? "Whether our races were relevant, I don't know, but I've learned that others think it's part of these stories," he wrote. He didn't elaborate on what that meant.

His mother, Geetha Ramaswamy, in an email to The Enquirer through a campaign spokeswoman, alluded to difficulties early in school.

"He was a bit shy and went through some rough times in school days but never once complained," Geetha Ramaswamy wrote. "He was always genuinely interested in learning and excelling and at the same time, embraced failures gracefully."

Interest in conservative politics dates to high school

It's this experience that shaped his current conservative politics, Ramaswamy writes.

"Those days watching my mom put in extra hours at the nursing homes, those nights watching my dad take on law school, it convinced me that our destiny was in our own hands," he wrote.

While his father attended law school, the young Ramaswamy, then in middle school, would talk politics, particularly his father's hatred of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia.

"I slowly started making whatever argument was the opposite of my dad," Ramaswamy wrote. "Typical preteen move. So I became a conservative because I was a bratty kid taking Scalia's side against my dad."

When his teammates weren't playing "Stump the Vivek," his tennis coach remembers Ramaswamy debating politics with him in the front seat of the van, with Ramaswamy taking the conservative side and King taking the other side.

"His identity was very conservative," King said. "... suffice to say, I'm not."

Still, some of the views he's heard from Ramaswamy have surprised him, particularly his comments on climate change. Ramaswamy in the first Republican debate said the "climate change agenda is a hoax." He has said the country should abandon what he called the "climate cult" and unleash fracking, coal and nuclear energy to spur economic growth.

Those comments don't jibe with what King remembers of his long-ago debates in the tennis van crisscrossing Ohio.

"I can't believe that he believes that there is no global warming," King said. "I think he's trying to summon the Trump Republican conservatives."

Devoted to academics

Anson Frericks doesn't remember Ramaswamy talking much about politics in high school. Frericks remembers his friend as a serious student with a sense of humor.

Frericks, who now lives in the wealthy neighborhood of Indian Hill, just east of Cincinnati, graduated from St. Xavier High School a year ahead of Ramaswamy in 2002.

They met when Frericks was a sophomore and Ramaswamy was a freshman. They were in mock trial together. He remembers Ramaswamy, even then, made persuasive arguments.

Ramaswamy was fluent in French, studied Latin and devoted almost all his free time to academics, music and tennis. (The rapping, and Ramaswamy's alter ego, Da Vek, didn't start until after high school, according to Frericks.)

That's how he maintained a grade of 99%, top in his class.

"The only reason you couldn't have 100 at St. X is the religion department would not give you a perfect score of 100," Frericks said. "Because they said that only God was perfect."

Ramaswamy could relate to people. But he didn't spend much time partying, Frericks said. He'd go to football games and mixers but wouldn't stay late.

Ramaswamy's parents built a study for him in their basement, all white walls and no windows.

"That's kind of like where he studied, he did all his work," Frericks said. "And then on weekends, when the rest of us were, you know, sleeping in or going to parties, rather, he was generally taking additional classes or math classes down at UC (the University of Cincinnati) or other areas."

Frericks kept in touch with Ramaswamy and co-founded Strive Asset Management with him in 2021 with the goal of creating a fund that counters environmental and social activism of other investment management firms.

Barber knew he'd eventually run for president

That he's running for president didn't surprise many people who knew him growing up, though many expected it would come later in life.

"I knew he would," said Donnie "DJ" Judd, 77, a Sharonville barber who cut Ramaswamy's hair when he was in middle school and high school. Ramaswamy liked his hair cut "right to the top of the ear, kind of square in the back and a little bit off the top."

"As you go through years of cutting somebody’s hair, you see the potential, and this boy was just, he was really full of potential," Judd said.

When asked what gave him that impression, Judd reclined in one of his barbershop chairs and looked pensively at the walls of his barbershop festooned with decades of old photos, pennants and regalia from the decades he's cut hair in that building. He couldn't remember anything specific, just that Ramaswamy left an impression as being very smart.

Judd likes Trump. But he'd vote for Ramaswamy over Trump. He thinks Ramaswamy will be Trump's vice president. Ramaswamy has made a point of praising Trump and courting his support during the campaign, even though they're ostensibly primary opponents.

Judd also left an impression on Ramaswamy. In his 2021 book, "Woke, Inc.: Inside Corporate America's Social Justice Scam," Ramaswamy uses Judd as an example of American entrepreneurship. "DJ, my barber since childhood in Sharonville, Ohio, started a barbershop because it was his dream to run a business and to drive a Corvette to work."

Judd bought that Corvette in 2001.

As a side note, Judd hasn't cut Ramaswamy's hair since he graduated high school. So he was not responsible for the pompadour Ramaswamy sported on the debate stage on September 27 that sparked online commentary, including some on X comparing it to the styles depicted in the movie "Eraserhead" and TV series "Beavis and Butt-Head."

From Ohio to New York and back

For a billionaire wunderkind, Ramaswamy wasn't well known in his hometown until 2021, when he started to lay the foundation for what would become his presidential campaign. He began appearing frequently on cable news, primarily Fox News. He released the first of three books to date that attack what he sees as "woke" politics in American business.

For much of the past two decades, Ramaswamy lived in New York City, working as a hedge fund manager and biotech entrepreneur amassing a fortune near $1 billion, according to Forbes. He moved back to the region to be closer to family, according to his campaign, buying a home in Butler County just north of Cincinnati in 2019. He moved to a Columbus suburb two years later because his wife, Dr. Apoorva Ramaswamy, works as a throat cancer surgeon at the Ohio State University.

"I've only begun to engage publicly outside of the world of biotech after a long time in the last year-and-half," Ramaswamy told The Enquirer on the "That's So Cincinnati" podcast in 2021.

He attends a Hindu temple in the Dayton area, the same one where he and his family attended during his childhood.

Finding people in the Cincinnati area to talk about Ramaswamy wasn't easy. His alma mater St. Xavier High School denied any interviews with his former teachers, citing a fear of losing the school's nonprofit status by appearing to endorse a candidate. The Enquirer reached out to at least 10 of his classmates, teachers and former tennis teammates.

The presidential run surprised his parents, his mother, Geetha Ramaswamy, wrote in an emailed response to The Enquirer.

"We were surprised about the timing," she wrote in the email. "We had a feeling he might get into politics one day but to make a huge sacrifice of his time, family and financial commitment at this young age was something we did not wish on him."

Frericks saw his friend winning a Nobel Prize in math or science instead of politics. Unlike Ramaswamy's tennis coach, Frericks said he doesn't remember Ramaswamy bringing up politics much in high school.

"Would I have been surprised if he ended up running for president?" Frericks said. "Probably not, just given his intellectual horsepower and also his raw determination to will things to happen."

This article originally appeared on Cincinnati Enquirer: 2024 election: What is Vivek Ramaswamy's background?