Welcome back to The Stratosphere.

Today, a look at the inroads that Vivek Ramaswamy is making in Silicon Valley and among major Republican donors. There’s lots of inside dish below, including how much Vivek’s super PAC has raised so far, and details on upcoming fundraisers for the new it-boy of G.O.P. politics.

Mentioned in today’s column: Tucker Carlson, David Sacks, Omeed Malik, Peter Thiel, Steve Schwarzman, Chamath Palihapitiya and plenty more movers and shakers in Silicon Valley and Washington…

P.S. Puck is turning 2! We’re offering our biggest discount ever—here’s a link subscribers can share with their friends, coworkers, and relatives for 30% off a subscription. Or use this code INSIDEACCESS at checkout.

But first…

• Ronny’s Collection Plate Derby: I’ve learned that both Tim Scott and Ron DeSantis are planning return trips to Silicon Valley next month, both around September 28. Details on their multi-event swings are still being finalized, but one fundraiser already on the calendar is a $3,300-a-head “roundtable brunch” that DeSantis is hosting that day in Steinbeck’s Salinas, the heart of California’s famous breadbasket, where hosts include several local crop barons, according to an invite. (DeSantis will come to the Bay Area around then, too, I am told, but there’s no paper yet.)

  Other events on the DeSantis docket, according to a Q3 fundraising schedule distributed recently to bundlers, include a fundraiser on September 13 in Greenwich, Connecticut; three Florida fundraisers on September 18; five events in Texas from September 19 to 22; and an end-of-quarter event in Panama City Beach on September 30.

Just a few hours earlier, of course, Ramaswamy had been on the debate stage thundering that he was the “only candidate on stage not bought and paid for.” His arrival at a high-roller donor party struck some guests as a bit hypocritical. But it’s politics, and Ramaswamy knows the game: It takes upwards of a billion dollars these days to make it to the White House, more than a fair amount of dough, even for a candidate who today is worth some $800 million. Hence Ramaswamy’s efforts to quietly expand his rolodex of financial support, and why he and his wife were seen briefly working the crowd.

Ramaswamy, whose campaign has claimed that he could spend $100 million on the race, may not be a “super PAC puppet,” as he labeled his rivals during the debate, but he does have a super PAC: American Exceptionalism PAC. The group only had $225,000 on hand as of June 30, but over the last ten days has dropped about $1 million of independent expenditures, including on a television ad in Iowa, suggesting that they now have real money in the tank. Indeed, I am told by a source familiar with the matter that the super PAC has raised or received commitments north of $10 million for its efforts since the end of the second quarter. It’s been quite a six-week run.

On the surface, Ramaswamy’s financial strategy looks more like Trump’s in 2016—grassroots fundraising plus some self-funding—than it does like DeSantis’s bundler-call-center campaign. While he has put up $15 million of his own money, Vivek is succeeding with small donors who ingest his ubiquitous media hits and applauded his fiery debate performance. On Tuesday, he announced that he has collected an impressive 100,000 unique contributors. But the former biotech entrepreneur has also done spurts of traditional high-dollar fundraising: he held a July event at the Ritz Carlton Residences in Philadelphia, for instance, along with an August luncheon in Irvine with a traditional V.I.P. photo line. Tomorrow, he is scheduled to have a cocktail hour ($500 a ticket) and a private dinner ($3,300) in suburban St. Louis with supporters, according to an invite I’ve seen. (The event was moved to a different location after I tweeted about it, accidentally sparking a mini cancellation-by-social-media for the trendy restaurant slated to host it.)

Sure, his hypeman antics strike plenty of donors as arrogant and annoying in a Harvard debate-kid kind of way. But Vivek has serious momentum after his first major national showing, and big donors have to reckon with him whether they like it or not. The Ramaswamy campaign, after all, is now very real, with a National Finance Committee structure and innovative “Kitchen Cabinet” commission-based bundler program, which has more than 2,000 participants. “He’s been putting in the legwork to cultivate these donors, and now that he’s in a place to capitalize, you’re going to see a lot more hard-side fundraisers,” a source close to the campaign told me.

Ramaswamy marries those relationships with his fluency in the language of the New Right, which reviles ESG initiatives, embraces Tucker Carlson, and wants to fight the culture wars rather than foreign wars. Vivek, whose books include Woke Inc. and Nation of Victims, recently said that he would want Elon Musk to be an adviser to his White House (Musk last week suggested Vivek should be the V.P. nominee); he called the climate agenda “a hoax”; and continues to push a four-dimensional geopolitical master plan in which the U.S. abandoning Ukraine somehow causes Russia to end its alliance with China. On last week’s episode of the influential All-In pod, a platform approaching Oprah-status in the conservative tech community, the co-hosts mostly gushed about Ramaswamy’s debate performance, with Chamath Palihapitiya, a Haley supporter, going so far as to blurt out that he thought Vivek had “a really good chance at winning the Republican nomination.”

Some of these Silicon Valley talking heads are part of a new donor group that’s taken a shine to Vivek: Rockbridge Network, which hosts twice-a-year get-togethers for funders of the so-called New Right and other MAGA-inflected ideologies. David Sacks, the venture capitalist, All-In host, and ascendant donor who has backed Rockbridge projects, recently hosted Ramaswamy for an intimate meet-and-greet at Sacks’ place in Los Angeles, as I reported the other week, and the two remain in touch. A formal fundraiser is in the works, I am told, as part of Sacks’ plan to back G.O.P. candidates whom he sees as most committed to ending the war in Ukraine. (He’ll do a DeSantis event at some point, too.)

Ramaswamy also has earned the backing of Rockbridge co-leader Omeed Malik, an early DeSantis supporter and former investment banker who is well-connected with some tech leaders. On Sunday, Malik toasted Vivek at an “intimate dinner and discussion” that he and his wife Caroline hosted for Ramaswamy in Sag Harbor. Malik, a former investor in The Daily Caller whose venture capital firm, 1789 Capital, is now planning to invest in Carlson’s new media venture, is a player to watch in G.O.P. politics and media this year. Rockbridge likely won’t endorse a candidate, but watch its people.

Thiel is hardly the only major donor sitting on the sidelines or otherwise dispirited by the state of the race. After all, it’s almost Labor Day, and it does not appear that there is any coordinated plan by the powers that be to coalesce behind a candidate who can stop Trump. “Obviously, Trump is still the problem,” one DeSantis bundler told me the other day, in a deadpan tone, after dutifully recounting the team’s recent fundraising successes. Another establishment-minded fundraiser asked me, Where is the plan from the Koch network? Why was Tim Scott such a dud the other night? Despondence reigns supreme right now.

Alas, Ramaswamy is not the answer, either, for Republican benefactors who pine for the days of Bush and Romney-Ryan. I learned the other day that Ramaswamy had a private meeting a few months ago in New York with Steve Schwarzman, the Blackstone billionaire who wants to see the party move on from Trump and has met most of the candidates, but it’s hard to imagine that Vivek—still very much an outlier and an oddity for the G.O.P. donor community, especially on foreign policy—is what he has in mind. “A lot of these traditional donors who have been looking at other candidates are going to have to reevaluate,” the source close to the Vivek campaign told me. “You’re getting to the fall here. Who is going to be left to pick from at the end?”