Years before Vivek Ramaswamy made his fight against “woke capitalism” a centerpiece of his political identity, a federal civil racketeering lawsuit alleges he was privately offered a 30% stake and the CEO job in another company’s planned anti-ESG investment business — then launched Strive Asset Management after the deal fell apart.
The lawsuit, filed May 16, 2024, in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Georgia by investors and entities connected to the failed conservative financial-services startup GloriFi, accuses Ramaswamy and numerous other wealthy investors and business figures of participating in a scheme to misappropriate GloriFi’s ideas and confidential information and use them to create competing companies.
No court has found that Ramaswamy stole GloriFi’s business plan, misappropriated its trade secrets or committed racketeering. But the allegations against him are unusually specific, and parts of the chronology can be independently verified through federal securities records and contemporaneous reporting.
According to the 141-page federal complaint, GloriFi founder Toby Neugebauer discussed bringing Ramaswamy into the company in an executive capacity in the fall of 2021. On Nov. 2, 2021, Neugebauer allegedly offered Ramaswamy 30% of a proposed GloriFi asset-management venture called “WhiteRock” if Ramaswamy would become its CEO.
The proposed business was designed as a conservative counterweight to BlackRock and other major asset managers. The lawsuit says WhiteRock would offer low-cost exchange-traded funds while using its shareholder voting power to advance what GloriFi characterized as pro-America, pro-capitalism and anti-ESG priorities.
The complaint says the business intended to begin with energy ETFs.
Months later, Ramaswamy launched a company built around a strikingly similar public mission.
‘Monopoly board pieces’
The lawsuit says that on Nov. 3, 2021 — one day after the WhiteRock offer — Ramaswamy texted Neugebauer about money he needed to reserve for “two other ‘monopoly board pieces’ we also need to get off the ground.”
According to the complaint, Ramaswamy was referring to an internally produced GloriFi graphic depicting the company’s planned financial-services businesses as spaces on a Monopoly-style board. The graphic is reproduced in the federal complaint and includes a space labeled “GloriFi Asset Management,” which the plaintiffs say represented the WhiteRock business.
The complaint says Neugebauer ultimately decided not to make Ramaswamy GloriFi’s co-CEO after further discussions, in part because Ramaswamy planned to devote significant time to a future presidential campaign. Neugebauer instead allegedly offered to make Ramaswamy GloriFi’s largest outside investor.
The lawsuit says Ramaswamy accepted that investment opportunity.
Forbes independently reported in 2024 that Ramaswamy was involved with GloriFi early in its development and quoted a person with knowledge of the relationship saying Neugebauer and Ramaswamy had “detailed conversations” about GloriFi’s ETF-management business.
Forbes also reported that GloriFi raised approximately $55 million from investors that included Ramaswamy, Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund, Citadel founder Ken Griffin, Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale and other wealthy financiers and business figures.
The relationship falls apart
According to the federal complaint, the relationship changed dramatically after Neugebauer decided against giving Ramaswamy the GloriFi leadership position.
The complaint alleges that on Nov. 8, 2021 — the day after Neugebauer says he told Ramaswamy and former Mike Pence chief of staff Nick Ayers that Ramaswamy would not become GloriFi’s co-CEO — Breanne Harmsen, an associate of Ayers, downloaded what the complaint describes as the entirety of GloriFi’s confidential and proprietary information from company servers.
The plaintiffs allege the download was performed on behalf of the defendants. The publicly available complaint does not establish that Ramaswamy personally ordered the download, received the files or knew it had occurred.
The lawsuit further alleges that Ramaswamy and other defendants subsequently began working on a competing effort it calls “Project Whitestone,” a name the plaintiffs explicitly contrast with GloriFi’s “WhiteRock.”
That allegation also has not been proven. The publicly available complaint does not include an underlying Ramaswamy or Strive document independently establishing that “Project Whitestone” was a name actually used by Ramaswamy’s side.
What happened next, however, is public record.
Strive launches months later
On May 10, 2022, Ramaswamy and his high-school friend Anson Frericks publicly launched Strive Asset Management. Strive’s launch announcement said the company had raised more than $20 million and would compete with major asset managers including BlackRock, Vanguard and State Street.
Strive said it planned to create investment funds whose shareholder votes would push American corporations to focus on what it called “excellence over politics.” Contemporary reporting described the venture as an effort to challenge large asset managers over their use of shareholder power on environmental and social issues.
The similarities alleged by the GloriFi plaintiffs did not stop with the broad anti-ESG concept.
Strive’s first ETF was focused on energy.
Federal securities records identify the Strive U.S. Energy ETF, ticker DRLL, as Strive’s first fund and give it an August 2022 inception date. Strive’s current fund records list Aug. 8, 2022, as the fund’s inception date.
When Strive publicly launched DRLL, the company described the energy fund as an alternative to ESG mandates imposed by large asset managers and said it intended to use shareholder engagement and proxy voting to encourage U.S. energy companies to invest more heavily in oil, gas and other energy production.
That sequence sits at the center of the lawsuit: GloriFi alleges that it had already described to Ramaswamy an anti-ESG ETF business intended to compete with BlackRock, beginning with the energy sector, before Ramaswamy launched Strive and made an energy ETF its first fund.
The plaintiffs contend the resemblance was not coincidence. They accuse Ramaswamy and others of taking the concept.
Ramaswamy has not been found liable for doing so.
Neugebauer invested in Strive, too
There is also an important fact that complicates the plaintiffs’ account: Neugebauer himself later agreed to invest in Ramaswamy’s new company.
According to the federal complaint, Ramaswamy initially described Strive to Neugebauer as something substantially different from WhiteRock. The lawsuit says Ramaswamy discussed a beer brand centered on American values as well as an actively managed hedge fund that would pick stocks.
Because GloriFi was not planning a beer company or an actively managed fund, the complaint says Neugebauer believed there was no conflict and agreed to invest in Strive effective March 3, 2022.
The lawsuit alleges that Strive then changed course before its public launch.
Instead of launching primarily as the beer business or actively managed hedge fund allegedly described to Neugebauer, Strive emerged in May 2022 as an asset-management company explicitly challenging ESG investing. Public trademark records also show Strive Enterprises filed applications for “Strive Asset Management,” “Excellence Funds” and “Excellence Capital” in April 2022, shortly before the company’s public launch.
The plaintiffs argue that this sequence is significant: Neugebauer says he invested when he believed Ramaswamy was building a different business, only to later see Strive launch an investment model he believed closely resembled WhiteRock.
Again, that is the plaintiffs’ allegation, not a judicial finding.
GloriFi collapses
GloriFi itself proved to be a spectacular business failure.
The company shut down in November 2022 and filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy in February 2023. Forbes reported that GloriFi entered bankruptcy with roughly $40 million in liabilities and about $600,000 in assets after burning through more than $60 million in approximately 16 months.
Contemporaneous reporting and accounts from former employees described missed product launches, technology failures, heavy spending and serious internal management problems. Those facts complicate the lawsuit’s broader theory that GloriFi’s investors and competitors were responsible for destroying the company.
Several defendants have also forcefully rejected Neugebauer’s allegations. A spokesperson for Griffin called them “fabricated nonsense” in a statement to Forbes. Lonsdale told Forbes that he lost money on GloriFi, while representatives of Old Glory called allegations against that company unfounded. Other defendants either declined to comment or did not respond to Forbes.
At the same time, Forbes reported that two people with knowledge of GloriFi and the circumstances surrounding its collapse, along with several former GloriFi employees, defended substantial portions of Neugebauer’s account.
The RICO lawsuit never reached the merits
The Georgia lawsuit accused Ramaswamy and the other defendants of violations of Georgia racketeering law and the federal civil RICO statute, along with theft of trade secrets, conspiracy and other claims. Those causes of action are detailed both in the original complaint and in a later 97-page federal bankruptcy court opinion examining who legally owned the claims.
But the case soon collided with GloriFi’s bankruptcy.
U.S. District Judge Eleanor Ross initially stayed the Georgia litigation in July 2024 and then administratively closed the case on Oct. 3, 2024, pending the outcome of the related bankruptcy proceedings in the Northern District of Texas.
The Georgia court made clear that the parties were expected to report back after the bankruptcy matters concluded. As recently as October 2025, Ross was still requesting status information about the unresolved bankruptcy proceedings. The public docket was updated through August 2026 without showing a merits judgment against Ramaswamy.
Then, in June 2025, U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Michelle Larson issued a significant ruling over who actually had the legal right to pursue many of the allegations.
Larson found that the “vast majority” of the facts alleged in the federal and Georgia RICO claims described direct injuries to GloriFi itself, rather than injuries unique to Neugebauer.
The court specifically pointed to allegations that defendants interfered with GloriFi’s fundraising, illegally downloaded confidential or proprietary data, copied company products and converted GloriFi trade secrets.
That distinction was critical. Once GloriFi entered bankruptcy, causes of action belonging to the company generally became property of the bankruptcy estate and fell under the authority of the Chapter 7 trustee.
Larson concluded that the portions of the federal and Georgia RICO claims based on injuries to GloriFi belonged to the bankruptcy estate rather than Neugebauer. The portions involving alleged personal disparagement of Neugebauer were different because those alleged injuries were particular to him.
The bankruptcy court also found that Neugebauer and WPI Collateral Management had willfully violated the bankruptcy automatic stay by bringing claims that belonged to the estate without first getting permission from the bankruptcy court.
Larson permanently enjoined pursuit of the litigation in its existing form. But the judge expressly noted that Neugebauer and WPI could seek authority to amend or refile claims that were not derivative claims belonging to the bankruptcy estate.
That was a serious procedural setback for the plaintiffs.
But it was not a ruling that their central allegations against Ramaswamy were false.
The bankruptcy court did not find that Ramaswamy stole GloriFi’s intellectual property, participated in the alleged server download or committed racketeering. It also did not adjudicate those accusations in Ramaswamy’s favor on their merits.
Instead, the litigation was derailed largely by a different question: whether the people who filed most of the claims had the legal right to bring them in the first place.
A different origin story for a company central to Ramaswamy’s rise
The dispute is notable because Strive became a major component of Ramaswamy’s public profile before he entered presidential politics and later became the Republican nominee for Ohio governor.
At its launch, Strive presented itself as a challenger to BlackRock, Vanguard and State Street and argued that large asset managers were using ordinary investors’ money and shareholder voting power to push corporations toward political and social priorities.
That mission remained central to the company for years. In later materials filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Strive said Ramaswamy and Frericks founded the company in 2022 and credited it with helping roll back ESG and DEI mandates in corporate America.
Ramaswamy became one of the country’s most prominent critics of ESG investing, frequently pointing to Strive as a market-based alternative to the corporate behavior he condemned.
The federal lawsuit presents a sharply different account of how that business began.
According to the plaintiffs, months before Strive existed, Ramaswamy discussed becoming the public face of another company’s anti-ESG investment operation, was offered 30% of the venture, received an explanation of an ETF strategy positioned against BlackRock and exchanged a message about financing other pieces of GloriFi’s planned financial-services operation.
Months later, Strive publicly launched as an anti-ESG asset manager.
Its first ETF focused on energy — the same sector the lawsuit says GloriFi had planned to target first with WhiteRock.
Whether those similarities resulted from misappropriation, from investors and entrepreneurs independently pursuing similar ideas during the rise of the anti-ESG movement, or from some other explanation has never been resolved on the merits by a court.
But as Ramaswamy campaigns to become Ohio’s next governor, the allegation remains embedded in the federal court record surrounding one of the companies most closely associated with his rise: that the business model behind Strive was shown to him before Strive existed — and that its creator says Ramaswamy took it.
