Judy Faulkner - the woman who created Epic
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She’s quite remarkable.
She's worth $7.8 billion. She's never cashed out a single share. And she's giving 99% of it away.
When Judy Faulkner's children asked her what they needed most from her, they answered the way most kids would: food and money. Security and resources. The tangible things that make life easier.
Her response stopped them. "No," she said. "You need roots and wings."
Roots to ground you. Wings to lift you. Everything else is just details.
Decades later, at 82 years old, she's building those same two things for millions of people she'll never meet. And she's betting $7.7 billion that it matters.
Judy Faulkner's story doesn't start with billions. It starts in a basement.
In 1979, she launched a company called Human Services Computing from a cramped space in Madison, Wisconsin. She had $70,000 borrowed from friends and family, two part-time employees who believed in her vision, and a computer the size of a washing machine that she programmed herself, line by painstaking line.
Her mission was deceptively simple: create software that could track patient medical records across different hospitals and keep people from disappearing into the cracks of a fragmented healthcare system.
She'd seen what happened when information didn't follow the patient. She'd heard the stories of preventable tragedies, of doctors making decisions in the dark because critical medical history was locked away in filing cabinets 50 miles away or lost in incompatible systems.
But one story changed everything.
Her husband Gordon, a pediatrician, had cared for a young girl for years. When the family moved to Milwaukee, just 75 miles away, the girl became ill. At the new hospital, doctors couldn't access her medical records. They didn't know her history. They didn't know how to treat her unique condition. And by the time they pieced together fragments of information, it was too late.
She died.
Gordon was shattered. The next morning, Judy went back to her basement and doubled down on her mission. This would never happen again. Not if she could help it.
It took her team nearly two years to develop software that could allow hospitals to share patient records across different systems. It took two more years to convince skeptical hospital administrators that it would work. But she persisted.
That basement startup became Epic Systems.
Today, Epic holds the medical records of more than 325 million patients. It serves roughly half of all hospital beds in the United States. The company generates $5.7 billion in annual revenue. And Judy Faulkner still runs it at 82 years old, showing up to work every day at Epic's sprawling 1,670-acre campus in Wisconsin, a place so whimsical with Harry Potter and Alice in Wonderland-themed buildings that one executive described her as "a female cross between Bill Gates and Willy Wonka."
But here's what makes her different from almost every other tech billionaire: she never cashed out.
She never took money from venture capitalists who would've pushed her toward profit over patients. She never took the company public and subjected it to quarterly earnings pressure. She never sold to the highest bidder. She built Epic her way, kept it private, and stayed focused on one thing: better care for patients.
"Why be owned by people whose interest is primarily return of equity?" she once said.
While other founders were ringing bells at stock exchanges and buying yachts, Judy was writing code and solving problems.
In 2015, she signed the Giving Pledge, the commitment started by Bill Gates and Warren Buffett asking billionaires to give away at least half their wealth. But Judy went further. She pledged 99%. Not half. Not most. Nearly everything.
In 2019, she and Gordon launched the Roots & Wings Foundation, named after that conversation with her children years earlier. The foundation focuses on what she believes everyone deserves: roots—food, shelter, healthcare, education—and wings—the opportunity to rise.
In 2020, Roots & Wings gave $15 million to 115 organizations. By 2024, that number had exploded to $67 million distributed to over 300 nonprofits. Her goal is $100 million per year by 2027. She's systematically selling her Epic shares back to the company and funneling every dollar into giving.
Of the 256 billionaires who have signed the Giving Pledge, only a handful are actually following through with substantial giving during their lifetimes.
Judy Faulkner is one of them.
She's never taken a penny for herself from her shares. Every dollar she's made beyond her salary is going back into the world. She's funding healthcare access for underserved communities. Education for children who need it most. Support systems for families struggling to survive.
She's giving others the roots they need to stand firm and the wings they need to soar.
In an era where billionaires compete over rocket launches and social media empires, Judy Faulkner built something fundamentally different. She built a company that helps hundreds of millions of people receive better medical care. She built it without compromising her values. And when her time comes, nearly every dollar she earned will continue working to lift others up.
She could've cashed out decades ago and spent her life on private islands. Instead, she's still in Wisconsin, still writing software strategies, still thinking about the patients she'll never meet but whose lives her work will touch.
That's not just a business success story. That's a blueprint for what wealth can become when it's guided by purpose instead of ego, by service instead of status, by roots and wings instead of rockets and yachts.
Her legacy won't be measured in billions accumulated. It'll be measured in lives saved, children educated, families stabilized, and communities strengthened.
She asked her children what they needed most. They said food and money.
She taught them they needed roots and wings.
And now she's spending her fortune making sure millions of others can have both. -
Why? Because I criticize its flaws? My biggest problem is with EMRs because IMO they have taken doctors from time with patients to time feeding the EMR. It’s getting better, but there is a very long way to go before they live up to the vision. If you go to an ER the doc is almost certain not to absorb your medical history even if you are currently in treatment by another doc. If you go to the hospital out of your area they will have to jump through hoops to get your history. The insurance companies benefit more than clinicians. This is in no way unique to Epic.
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I had some exposure to Epic at my previous job. Any software or technical challenges in this space (and there are real ones) - pale in comparison to getting the tech to work within healthcare processes.
Hats of to Judy for cracking that alchemy.
Healthcare tech is an absolutely terrifying space full of process complexity and technical debt.
I've seen systems where part of the process is using an automated letter opener and automated scanner then optical character recognition to get patient bills into a system - because there was no hope of switching some paper aspects of the process to digital.
