Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy revealed during a campaign stop Friday that his ‘ideal’ pick for vice president would be someone like Elon Musk.
‘I’m looking for people who are executives,’ Ramaswamy said after a voter in Corydon, Iowa, asked if he would be able to find enough cabinet picks who agree ‘with you that won’t cut your legs off.’
‘Not in the pool of Washington, D.C.,’ the 38-year-old presidential candidate answered. ‘If you’re looking outside the pool, there’s 300 million mostly good people in this country … So, a lot of them are going to be outsiders. I mean, an ideal vice president would be someone like an Elon Musk. Now, he wasn’t born in the country, so he can’t, you know, but that’s the mold.’
Musk would be unable to run for the vice presidency or presidency because he isn’t a natural-born citizen of the U.S. Musk was born in South Africa.
Ramaswamy has previously said he would consider Musk as an adviser in the White House.
Earlier at Friday’s town hall, Ramaswamy said he had learned from former President Trump that it’s important to surround oneself with some outsiders in the White House.
‘It helps to have somebody who has complete and total disregard for the norms of Washington, D.C.,’ he said. ‘Let’s take a jackhammer to it. It’s all fake. Most of it’s made up.’
At the end of October, Ramaswamy revealed that Musk, who is the CEO of Telsa, SpaceX and owns X, formerly Twitter, had attended one of his fundraisers in Northern California.
‘He showed up late at night and we had a conversation,’ he confirmed to Reuters at the time.’
Ramaswamy added, ‘He and I are increasingly alone in this world as being free speech absolutists and that I think is different from a lot of people in both parties. I think that’s something he and I see eye to eye on.’
Ramaswamy’s stop in Corydon was one of several campaign stops in Iowa on Friday, including Chariton and Indianola.