Vivek Ramaswamy, Elon Musk.
Credit: Reuters Photo
With Indian-American Vivek Ramaswamy announcing his decision to contest as a 2024 US presidential candidate, Tesla CEO Elon Musk has voiced his support for the tech entrepreneur, referring to him as a ‘promising candidate’.
"He is a very promising candidate," Elon Musk wrote in a post on X on Thursday.
He was responding to a clip shared by television personality and conservative political commentator Tucker Carlson on X, formerly known as Twitter, with the caption - “Vivek Ramaswamy is the youngest Republican presidential candidate ever. He's worth listening to.”
Ramaswamy had made the big announcement during a live interview on Fox News’s prime time show of Tucker Carlson while promising to “put merit back” and end dependence on China.
“I'm all for putting America first, but in order to put America first, we have to first rediscover what America is. And to me, those are these basic rules of the road that set this nation into motion from meritocracy to free speech, to self-governance over aristocracy,” Ramaswamy told Fox News in an interview.
He has now become the third member from the Indian-American community to enter the Republican Party's presidential primary after Nikki Haley and Hirsh Vardhan Singh.
Two-term former Governor of South Carolina and former US Ambassador to the United Nations, Haley had announced her presidential campaign earlier this month. She said that she will contest against her former boss and ex-US President Donald Trump for the Republican Party's nomination.
Singh, meanwhile, announced his decision to run for the post on Thursday.
Ramaswamy had earlier dismissed the standard criticism of Trump Republicans who want to avoid saying anything mean about him: that Trump can’t win the general election. Trump would win, he argues, but it would be a close race, he was quoted as saying by The New York Times. He also went on to say that he is the only candidate who can get a landslide victory in the elections.