Today we're joined by Vivett Ramaswami, a supporter of Donald Trump, a former Republican presidential candidate himself, someone that's been active not just on social media but on the ground. And welcome to the program, mister Ramaswami. A simple question to start, why is former President Trump the best candidate for the technology industry and the bench capital industry that supports it.
Here, Look, I'll give you a simple answer to a straight question you asked, which is that he is the president in favor of mass deregulation and mass reform of the administrative state. I think the administrative state and the regulatory state is the single greatest impediment to innovation, to
new business formation, to business growth in this country. The actions of the three letter agencies, who are never elected, by the way, from the EPA to the FTC, to the SEC to the FDA, you go straight down the list, those three letter agencies are making most rules that govern businesses in this country today. Those rules were never passed
by Congress by democratic elected representatives. The current Supreme Court, which Donald Trump actually gave us much of the composition of that court, has declared.
Many of those regulations unconstitutional.
And Donald Trump has made clear that he wants to go in and not just incrementally tinker around the edges of that bureaucracy, but really to shake it down to its small core.
That it should have been in the first place.
And so I think that's the case I would make to technology investors, to entrepreneurs that Donald Trump is going to be the president who stands for taming in that regulatory state which currently acts as a wet blanket on the economy and innovation in particular.
VIVET could I ask as an extension of that, is there a specific area, be it crypto, be electric vehicles, be it space that you feel former President Trump is most focused in the list of priorities.
Well, I think that he's more focused on an overall American revival. All of those fit on the list. I think energy is big on the list for Donald Trump. Reviving the production of American energy, all forms of energy where America can be the leader. Donald Trump favors it, drilling,
fracking areas where America can actually establish energy abundance. Sets what Donald Trump favors, and especially in this era of AI and the increasing demands for electricity, for power, for energy that's particularly important for the United States to remain competitive.
You think about baseload.
Power generation for the electric grid, coal and natural gas are key inputs. A lot of democratic policy has been hostile to both of those, anti fracting policies, anti coal policies. By contrast, Donald Trump's pro energy policies are not just good for bringing down energy prices, so that's important, but also for powering and fueling the future generation of AI based technology revolutions that are going to require cheap and
abundant energy inputs. So that's one example. But I could go into each of the areas you named and to be.
Happy to do that.
We had a venture capitalist, well known founder in the area of AI and social We had Read Hoffman on the show yesterday. Now, he of course favors the other side of the equation and Harris's run for the administration, wanting consistency, wanting steady hand, but also is worried about forms of retribution.
Can you just take a listen to what he said yesterday?
Sure, Trump and Trump presidency won. His early presidency has shown a certain amount of grifter capitalism. It's like trying to penalize his opponents using the instruments of state.
Will that be any penalization of those who've voiced against him febec No.
I think there's gonna be no little retribution under Donald Trump. But I do find that common a little bit rich coming from a Kamala Airas supporter. Where there's only one president and administration in US history that is prosecuted or attempt to prosecute their rival in the middle of a political election, and it wasn't Donald Trump. It's the party that Donald Trump is running against.
Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.
So I think this idea of a steady hand.
I also want to give some airtime to this.
The idea of Kamala Harris is going to be some kind of steady hand when she has reversed her position in a matter of months on central questions, whether she favors bans on offshore drilling, whether she favors a ban on fracking, whether she favors universal healthcare. All of these are positions that she held very shortly before running for US president that in a matter of months foundational.
Questions about energy policy.
To help policy that have changed in a matter of months, I don't think is a strong case for a.
So called steady hand.
And one more point, investors, and particularly I know there's a technology focused show, particularly to entrepreneurs who have founded successful tech companies that may still be privately held. Here's a big one that really matters. Kamala Harris stands by her support and this is one area where she hasn't changed her stance. She stands by her support for a
tax on unrealized capital gains. That means many entrepreneurs, technologists, biotech entrepreneurs who may have paper gains in a private company would actually have to pay taxes with cash they don't actually have. That would stifle innovation across Silicon Valley and across this country. And I think it could be the single greatest tricker for stock market crash and a
second great depression. So, especially for a technology focused audience and a market focused audience, that's a big difference between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump. You could be a single issue voter on that alone, I would argue.
I think many would feel at the moment that the articulation around unrealized capital gains hasn't been made so substantively by a Harris campaign. And I'm just going to go back to the technology focus, and I'm glad that you went there for US Vivic because there is a technology focus that is chips in particular.
You are currently sat in Ohio.
Ohio is going to be a beneficiary in many ways of the chip sacked, billions of dollars going to building fabrication manufacturing within that state. And there is a potential concern that Donald Trump is against the chip sacked. He voiced out vehemently against it on a podcast recently.
Do you worry about.
That perhaps being overrun changed in direction?
No, I don't.
In fact, the reason I was against the chipsacked is because there's a lot of other baggage in there that shouldn't have been there, hiring impediments such as many of those companies semiconductorc companies are hiring people outside of the United States because of the regulatory burdens of doing so right here. There's also extra baggage and changing the way the National Science Foundation, the NSF makes grants on the basis of race and other criteria that don't relate to merit.
So that's the problem with Washington, DC is every time they pass one of these laws, the inflation Reduction Act or the Chips Act. There's so much other baggage they sneak into there that it dilutes the original vision or purpose of the Act in the first place. You want to foster semiconductor production in the United States, as I do. Here's how we do it, mass deregulation that lifts those
regulatory constraints in the United States. And I will tell you the reason in Video has become a multi trillion dollar company is not because of the Chips Act. It's because of booming demand for chips led by the advent of AI and the recent revolution and the AI boom that we've seen, and that lowering of the cost of capital is far more valuable for semiconductor companies than the incremental money in the pocket of the large that came from the CHIPSAC.
That's my view on the matter.
Vivic, may I just jump in on that point on Nvidia. In Video is not in isolation, but many of the chip companies have had their access to the China market impacted by those export controls. And simply put, China is the bigg end market for consumer electronics but critically important for cloud. Are you able to explain to our audience President former President Trump's position Visa e China on key American companies being able to do business in that market.
Well, I'll give you a base principle that I hope people can agree with, regardless of partisanship. We should not depend on our adversary for our own national security. You want to talk about chips, forty percent of the semiconductors feeding our Department of Defense, including the Army, Navy, Air Force, actually.
Come from China.
That doesn't make any sense for our own military industrial base, our own military stockpiles to depend on our adversary to provide them. God forbid, We're in a conflict scenario, and that's something that nobody wants for sure, but God forbid, we are in a conflict scenario with an adversary. They're not going to keep supplying those inputs. And so I
think it is sensible policy. And I don't care if you're a Republican or a Democrat for the United States to say, in sectors critical to our national security, at least for ourn military industrial base, we should not be dependent on our chief adversary.
And I think that sensible policy.
Donald Trump, I think above all, one of the things I like about him is a businessman but also a pragmatist. When it comes to these foreign policy dealings, he was respected and I think that put the US in a stronger position in a lot of those negotiations.
Mister Ramaswami, there was some interest in you when I said on social media you were coming on the show. We got a number of questions from the audience, But I'm going to put one to you, if that's okay. One user says, please ask him how much of his own money was spent on his campaign. I think a reference to your early run as a candidate. Has it given you an acceptable ROI? And what was the exposure and network effect for you in doing this supporting former President Trump?
Yeah, so the answer visual public record. I'm going to give you round nubers.
It was a little over thirty million dollars of my own hard earned money. By the way, I didn't inherit money. My parents came to this country with no money. But I'm a self made entrepreneur who's found in multi billion dollar companies, and the ROI on that I measure is not related to me. It's related to the impact we
have on our country. I was the youngest person ever to run for US president as a Republican, and one of the things I was proud we were able to do was to bring non traditional, disengaged citizens back into politics actually caring about our country, especially young people. I showed up on a college campus in Pennsylvania yesterday. There were two thousand plus young people that showed up just to hear the conversations we were having, one on one at a time.
That gave me a sense of inspiration.
It gave me a sense of deep gratification and satisfaction to say that this journey that I began in February of last year, where nobody knew my name, let alone could pronounce it, I was at zero point zero percent in the polls, and by the end of the race less than a year later, had beaten a vice president, multiple governors, and a former senator. It proves what's possible in the United States of America, and so was it
worth it. Absolutely, And I hope that our best days as a country, and my own ability to have an impact on it, is.
Still ahead of us.
Some of those young people perhaps you're talking to, care about Crypto, one of those companies that you formed, Strive asset management one point seven billion dollars in assets on a management is going to be going and buying in on bitcoin for the first time. Can you just articulate for us what you think the crypto policies will be under Trump.
Yeah.
First of all, I'm incredibly proud of Strive as a business I co founded. I stepped down as chairman before I ran for president, but I'm so proud of the team and what they've accomplished. Matt Cole, he's the CEO who was formerly a successful bond portfolio manager at CalPERS, is really leading stride with the vision for financial freedom, which I'm so proud of.
What they've done.
I'm going to view on the future of crypto policy is it's less related to helping one sector and more related to just reviving the principles the country was founded on.
In the first place.
Unbridled innovation competition as the answer, but there should be some regulation.
It should totally be unbridled.
Well, the first thing I would say is unbridled innovation. What we really need is regulatory clarity. So I think it is a sad state of affairs where you see a paradigm of regulation by enforcement, where many participants in the industry don't know what the rules are in the first place. So we can debate what the rules are, what they should be. I think that's a reasonable debate to have. But what we can't have is a situation
where people are guessing at what those rules are. I'll give you one example of that when the head when Lead Commissioner of the SEC could not answer before Congress whether ethereum was even a security.
Maybe it is and maybe it shouldn't be. But either way, at least the industry deserves to know.
And so I think regulation in the first principle, whether you're on the left or right, should be clarity, and I think that's missing in this sector, as in so many others today.
Vivet Ramaswami, thank you for coming back on Bloomberg Technology.
We appreciate your time.