Want Elon Musk to be my presidential adviser: Vivek Ramaswamy

Washington: Vivek Ramaswamy, an Indian-American Republican presidential candidate, has indicated that he would like Elon Musk to be an adviser in his administration if he gets elected as the US president in 2024.

Ramaswamy, 38, made these remarks on Friday at a town hall in Iowa when he was asked about whom he would want as advisers for his potential presidency, NBC News reported.

Ramaswamy admires the mass layoffs Musk conducted after taking over Twitter last year.

The billionaire biotech entrepreneur said in response that he wanted people with a “blank fresh impression” who do not “come from within” the government.

“I’ve enjoyed getting to know better, Elon Musk recently, I expect him to be an interesting adviser of mine because he laid off 75 per cent of the employees at Twitter,” Ramaswamy was quoted as saying in the report.

“And then the effectiveness actually went up,” he noted.

A second-generation Indian-American, Ramaswamy founded Roivant Sciences 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, according to his bio.

Musk, 52, is the billionaire owner of SpaceX, Tesla and X, the platform formerly known as Twitter.

Ramaswamy has previously complimented Musk’s management of the social media company, now called X, saying he would run the government the way that Musk runs the company.

“What he did at Twitter is a good example of what I want to do to the administrative state,” Ramaswamy said in an interview on Fox News last week.

“Take out the 75 per cent of the dead weight cost, improve the actual experience of what it’s supposed to do.”

“He put an X through Twitter, I’ll put a big X through the administrative state,” he added. “So, that’s where I’m at on common tactics with Elon.”

The workforce of X has been cut down from just under 8,000 to about 1,500 since Musk bought Twitter for USD 44 billion last fall.

The billionaire — who previously pledged his support for Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ White House bid and co-hosted DeSantis’ chaotic campaign launch on Twitter Spaces — said last week that he found Ramaswamy to be a “very promising candidate.”

Ramaswamy is the youngest Republican presidential candidate ever. Nikki Haley, the former governor of South Carolina is another Indian-American Republican Party candidate vying for the party's nomination.

Ramaswamy has been vocal about his desire to shut down the Department of Education, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, the NBC report added.

He is one of the wealthiest Americans under the age of 40. He studied biology at Harvard before obtaining a law degree from Yale and was briefly a billionaire before a downturn in the stock market shrunk his wealth to just over USD 950 million, according to Forbes.