AN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER! A young entrepreneur makes the case that politics has no place in business, and sets out a new vision for the future of American capitalism.
There's a new invisible force at work in our economic and cultural lives. It affects every advertisement we see and every product we buy, from our morning coffee to a new pair of shoes. "Stakeholder capitalism" makes rosy promises of a better, more diverse, environmentally-friendly world, but in reality this ideology championed by America's business and political leaders robs us of our money, our voice, and our identity.
Vivek Ramaswamy is a traitor to his class. He's founded multibillion-dollar enterprises, led a biotech company as CEO, he became a hedge fund partner in his 20s, trained as a scientist at Harvard and a lawyer at Yale, and grew up the child of immigrants in a small town in Ohio. Now he takes us behind the scenes into corporate boardrooms and five-star conferences, into Ivy League classrooms and secretive nonprofits, to reveal the defining scam of our century.
The modern woke-industrial complex divides us as a people. By mixing morality with consumerism, America's elites prey on our innermost insecurities about who we really are. They sell us cheap social causes and skin-deep identities to satisfy our hunger for a cause and our search for meaning, at a moment when we as Americans lack both.
This book not only rips back the curtain on the new corporatist agenda, it offers a better way forward. America's elites may want to sort us into demographic boxes, but we don't have to stay there. Woke, Inc. begins as a critique of stakeholder capitalism and ends with an exploration of what it means to be an American in 2021--a journey that begins with cynicism and ends with hope.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Vivek Ramaswamy is a New York Times bestselling author and entrepreneur who has founded multiple successful enterprises. A first-generation American, he is the founder and Executive Chairman of Roivant Sciences, a new type of biopharmaceutical company focused on the application of technology to drug development. He founded Roivant in 2014 and led the largest biotech IPOs of 2015 and 2016, eventually culminating in successful clinical trials in multiple disease areas that led to FDA-approved products.
Mr. Ramaswamy was born and raised in southwest Ohio. He graduated summa cum laude in biology from Harvard in 2007 and began his career as a biotech investor at a prominent hedge fund. Mr. Ramaswamy continued to work as an investor while earning his law degree at Yale, where he was a recipient of the Paul and Daisy Soros Fellowship for New Americans.
Mr. Ramaswamy was featured on the cover of Forbes magazine in 2015 for his work in drug development. In 2020 he emerged as a prominent national commentator on stakeholder capitalism, free speech, and woke culture. He has authored numerous articles and op-eds, which have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, National Review, Newsweek, and Harvard Business Review.
