The Girl Who Died in Milwaukee
Sometime in 2004 or 2005 — the exact date has never been published, and Judy Faulkner does not volunteer it — her husband Gordon came home from work distraught. A pediatrician in Madison, Wisconsin, Gordon had provided years of care for a young girl whose family had recently moved to Milwaukee, roughly seventy-five miles east. The girl fell ill. She went to an emergency room. The physicians there had no way to access her medical history — no fax had been sent, no records transferred, no database queried. They did not know what to do. She died.
Gordon kept repeating it: if they'd just had her record, it wasn't hard, they would have known what to do. Judy Faulkner listened, and the next morning she went back to work at Epic Systems, the company she had founded in a basement twenty-five years earlier, and told her engineers they were going to build something — she didn't yet have a word for it — that would allow any hospital, anywhere, to pull up a patient's records instantly. "Although I didn't know the word," she later recalled. "All I knew was, we were going to send the records over."
It took nearly two years to build. It took another two years to persuade hospitals to use it; they were terrified of privacy lawsuits. But once the first providers adopted what Epic called Care Everywhere, the rest followed. By 2025, one hundred percent of Epic's customer organizations were interoperable — exchanging millions of patient records per day across institutional boundaries, regardless of which software the receiving hospital ran. The girl who died in Milwaukee became, in the calculus of corporate mythology, the invisible fulcrum on which a $5.7-billion-a-year company pivoted from dominance to ubiquity.
This is the paradox at the center of Judy Faulkner's story. She built the most consequential software company most Americans have never heard of — a private, Wisconsin-based enterprise that holds the electronic health records of more than 325 million patients worldwide, roughly 78 percent of digitized American medical data — and she did it by refusing nearly every orthodoxy of modern technology entrepreneurship. No venture capital. No acquisitions. No IPO. No budgets, technically. No marketing department to speak of. Seven or eight salespeople, globally. A 1,670-acre campus in Verona, Wisconsin, decorated with treehouses and wizard statues and a replica New York City subway station, where 14,000 employees gather monthly in an underground auditorium called Deep Space for mandatory meetings that include grammar lessons on the proper use of "who" versus "whom."
And yet. The software that doctors groan about — the system that can require 4,000 mouse clicks per emergency room shift, that has been implicated in burnout studies and billing controversies and at least one federal fraud investigation (involving a competitor's product, though Epic has not been immune to criticism) — is also the software that no hospital would sooner replace than its own CEO. In Epic's forty-six-year history, exactly one client has ever left. It came back six months later.
I was young, I didn't know it was hard. So I said sure, and I figured it out.
By the Numbers
The Epic Empire
$5.7BAnnual revenue (2024)
$7.8BJudy Faulkner's estimated net worth
325M+Patients with current Epic records worldwide
42%Share of U.S. acute care hospitals using Epic
14,000Employees at Epic Systems
1Clients lost in 46 years (returned in 6 months)
$0Venture capital ever raised
The Pharmacist's Daughter
Judith R. Faulkner was born on August 11, 1943, in the Erlton neighborhood of Cherry Hill, New Jersey, to Louis and Del Greenfield. Her father ran a pharmacy with a soda fountain — the kind of establishment that functioned as both medical outpost and community center in midcentury suburban America. Her mother, Del, had graduated from high school at fifteen with straight A's but never attended college, a fact that haunted her. "Only later did she realize she could have gotten in for free because she was such a good student," Faulkner reflected decades later, "and I think that really made her sad." Del eventually channeled her considerable intelligence into activism, becoming the executive director of Oregon Physicians for Social Responsibility.
The household was, in other words, one where medicine and social conscience coexisted in the air like weather. The father dispensing drugs across a counter; the mother organizing doctors to oppose nuclear proliferation. The daughter absorbing both frequencies — the granular specificity of pharmaceutical care and the systems-level ambition of someone who believed institutions could be reformed.
Faulkner attended Moorestown Friends School, a Quaker institution, and graduated in 1961. She went on to Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, where she majored in mathematics — a field she would later describe with unusual tenderness. "Math is truth," she has said, repeatedly, as though it were a prayer or a diagnosis. "And computer science is what works. It's great to put them together because you need both."
The moment of ignition came not in a laboratory or a boardroom but in seventh grade, when a math teacher began putting riddles on the blackboard. Faulkner couldn't stop solving them. The compulsion never left. At Dickinson, she excelled. During a summer job at the University of Rochester, she learned Fortran programming in a single week — taught herself, really, the way her mother had taught herself to lead advocacy organizations, the way her father had taught himself to run a business that doubled as a neighborhood institution.
She arrived at the University of Wisconsin–Madison for graduate study in computer science in 1965 — just two years after the discipline had begun to crystallize as a formal academic field. There she encountered Warner
Slack, a physician-professor who was teaching what may have been the first course anywhere in the world on computers in medicine. Slack asked her to join his research team. She said yes. She was twenty-two years old, and she had found the intersection — math and medicine, truth and what works — that would consume the next six decades of her life.
The Basement at 2020 University Avenue
The origin of Epic Systems involves, as these stories usually do, someone else's problem.
While working on her master's degree, Faulkner was approached by John Greist — then a chief resident in psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin — who needed an efficient way to schedule doctors' on-call shifts. Greist, who would later become a co-founder of Epic and then depart over a fundamental disagreement about its future, was a physician who recognized that the administrative machinery of medicine was as broken as its clinical systems were sophisticated. "When she said she was going to do it, she meant she was going to do it," Greist later said of Faulkner's approach to the scheduling problem.
She built a punch-card system that could generate an annual on-call schedule in eighteen seconds, for five dollars. The project took weeks of late nights. It was, in retrospect, a miniature rehearsal for everything that would follow: a clinical problem translated into computational logic, executed with obsessive precision, delivered at a cost so absurdly low that it functioned as a kind of provocation.
From the scheduling project, Faulkner moved to a larger challenge: building a database to track patient clinical information over time. This was the mid-1970s. Patient records in American hospitals were overwhelmingly paper-based — manila folders stuffed into basement filing cabinets, organized (loosely) by department, accessible (barely) to the physicians who needed them. If you saw a cardiologist at one hospital and a pulmonologist at another, neither had any systematic way of knowing what the other had done. The passage of Medicare and Medicaid in 1965 had created an enormous demand for standardized documentation — insurance companies and government programs needed records to process payments — but the infrastructure to manage that documentation remained stubbornly analog.
Faulkner's insight was architectural. Where existing systems (the few that existed) organized data by department or by visit, she organized it around the patient. One patient, one record, across time — past, present, and future. "I was thinking about how do you keep track of time," she recalled. "Some things never change, like your birth date. Some things always change, like your vital signs." The database she built on a Data General Eclipse 16-bit minicomputer — a machine roughly the size of a refrigerator, so sensitive that walking too close to it could corrupt the data — was, conceptually, the kernel of everything Epic would become.
She wrote all the original code herself. She was in her early thirties, wearing blue jeans and T-shirts in summer, sweatshirts in winter. She cut her own hair with scissors. No makeup. "I was a normal programmer," she said, "and I had no idea how you start a company."
For roughly two years, colleagues and early users of her system called and told her to start one. She laughed and said no. They kept calling. Finally, in 1979, she said yes. She went to someone who had recently spun off a company from the university for advice on how to do it. Human Services Computing was incorporated with $70,000 raised from friends, family, and a bank loan — part of it came from her parents, the pharmacist and the activist. The first office was a basement at 2020 University Avenue in Madison, with three part-time employees and some cheap desks. "We just got a lot of paint and painted it different shades of purple," she recalled.
The company's name would not survive long. During a preliminary meeting at Faulkner's home, one of the original clients pulled a dictionary off the shelf and looked up "epic": the glorious accounts of a nation's events. They liked it. It would be the story of a patient, not a nation.
The Refusal
Almost immediately, John Greist — the psychiatrist who had first asked Faulkner to solve his scheduling problem and who held shares in the new enterprise — began pushing to raise venture capital. Build faster, he argued.
Scale sooner. It was the 1980s; venture money was flowing into technology companies. The logic seemed obvious.
Faulkner said no.
"Part of my difficulty with her," Greist later told Forbes, "was me saying, 'Gosh, why don't we get some venture capital and we can build it faster?' And she said, 'No, we're not going to do that. Because we'll lose control.' And certainly, that's been her policy. And she has lived it out and proven it. I was wrong. She was right."
Greist stepped down from Epic's board in 1983, still holding shares, because the disagreement about funding was irreconcilable. It was the first and most consequential of Faulkner's refusals — a pattern that would define the company for decades. She would refuse venture capital. She would refuse to go public. She would refuse to acquire other companies. She would refuse to sell pieces of her software à la carte. She would refuse, in one memorable instance, to sell her software at all.
Once, leaders from a health system visited Epic's offices and explained their plan: they wanted a McKesson EHR for pharmacy, Cerner for nursing, Epic for documentation, "and so on." Faulkner leaned over to her salesperson and whispered, "Why are they here?" When it was Epic's turn to speak, they said: "That's an awful way to design a system and we're sorry you traveled here, but we won't sell our software to you."
The health system installed Epic's integrated system in the end. But the anecdote reveals something essential about Faulkner's temperament — a certainty that borders on stubbornness, a refusal to question her own yellow brick road. "I always think of it as the yellow brick road," she told the Cap Times in 2017. "I can see the yellow brick road. I know how to step down it and I don't want to go off of it. I can see it. And I think for the others maybe they can see it, but they question it. They say, 'Is it really the yellow brick road?' But they probably know it is."
She has made this refusal structural. Epic's ten commandments — printed on walls, splashed across bathroom mirrors, embedded in the company's physical and psychological infrastructure — begin with three prohibitions: Do not go public. Do not acquire or be acquired. Software must work. Her estate plan, which governs the voting of her stock after death, explicitly forbids anyone from voting to take the company public or to sell it. Three CEOs from Epic's customer health systems serve as "trust protectors" whose job is to sue anyone who doesn't follow the voting rules.
"Why be owned by people whose interest is primarily return of equity?" she has said. She researched public companies. She read shareholder comments on earnings calls. "They were vitriolic, in many cases, because the only thing they were looking at was return on their investment. Sometimes, there's a lot more than that."
The Kaiser Bet
For its first two decades, Epic grew slowly and deliberately, building its customer base through word of mouth in the ambulatory care market — outpatient clinics, small practices, the less glamorous precincts of American medicine where competition was lighter and the learning curve was manageable. By the end of 1995, the company had secured roughly 100 clients and employed 125 people. Revenue was modest. The company was, by technology-industry standards, invisible.
Two inflection points changed everything.
The first was technological. In 1994, Epic launched EpicCare — the first electronic medical record application to use a graphical user interface. While competitors were still operating in text-based environments, Faulkner's team built software that doctors could navigate with a mouse, with pull-down menus and visual displays that mimicked the logic of clinical thinking. Faulkner later described this as "the start of the EMR industry." It was also the start of a design philosophy that would prove both tremendously successful and perpetually controversial: the software would be comprehensive, integrated, and built entirely in-house, which meant it would be powerful but also dense, demanding, and — to the uninitiated — overwhelming.
The second inflection point was a single contract. In February 2003, Kaiser Permanente — the largest managed care organization in the United States, with 30 hospitals, 423 medical offices, and over 11,000 physicians — issued a request for proposals for a new electronic health record system. Epic was a relatively small company at the time, with annual revenues of approximately $50 million. Kaiser's two primary operational regions in California were running different systems, creating frustration and inefficiency. A previous attempt with IBM had failed.
Faulkner flew to Oakland. She presented Epic's integrated system — one patient, one record, across every setting of care. The competition was Cerner, a much larger company. Kaiser chose Epic.
The deal, reported as a $4 billion project over three years, was transformative. Epic's revenue leaped from roughly $50 million to $162 million almost overnight. But the significance was not merely financial. Kaiser became a reference site — proof that Epic's comprehensive, all-in-one approach could work at enormous scale. The Cleveland Clinic followed. Then Johns Hopkins. Then Massachusetts General. Then UCLA Health. Then the Mayo Clinic. Each new flagship customer made the next one easier to win.
Within ambulatory, if you remember back, every specialty had their own EMR. We had at least 30-plus niche EMRs. Just think through this: that's 30-plus contracts, 30-plus maintenance agreements, 30-plus vendor representatives. Now we have one: Epic.
The HITECH Act of 2009, which directed roughly $30 billion in federal incentives toward the adoption of electronic health records through a program called Meaningful Use, accelerated Epic's ascent still further. By the time the government was paying hospitals to digitize, Epic was already in pole position — the system that the most prestigious health systems in America had chosen, the standard against which all others were measured. KLAS Research, the healthcare industry's most influential ratings firm, named Epic the number-one overall software suite fourteen years running.
The numbers compounded. Revenue doubled, then doubled again. From $1.77 billion in 2014. To $2.7 billion in 2018. To $4.6 billion in 2023. To $5.7 billion in 2024. The company's valuation, by various estimates, reached $45 billion. And Faulkner's 43 percent ownership stake — she has never sold a single voting share — made her one of the wealthiest self-made women in the world, with a net worth of $7.8 billion.
The Software Factory and Its Discontents
Walk into any major American hospital and ask a doctor what they think of Epic. You'll likely get an eye roll, maybe a groan, possibly a detailed complaint about how many clicks it takes to order Tylenol.
This is the other side of the Epic story — the one that Faulkner has been, at times, remarkably resistant to acknowledging. A 2019 survey published in the Mayo Clinic Proceedings found that 870 American Medical Association physicians gave their EHR an average grade of F. Studies have documented correlations between EHR use and physician burnout, a problem that the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and the Massachusetts Medical Society called a "public health crisis." Emergency room doctors can face up to 4,000 mouse clicks per shift. An investigation by Kaiser Health News and Fortune, titled "Death by 1,000 Clicks," catalogued cases where software failures — across multiple vendors, not just Epic — contributed to patient harm, including one case where a test order for a brain aneurysm was never transmitted, and the patient died.
Faulkner's response to the burnout critique has been, at best, complicated. In an interview with Healthcare IT News, she said: "The latest studies I've seen are showing that there's not a high correlation between happiness with the EHR and happiness with their job and the problem of burnout." The statement drew sharp criticism from physicians. Dr. Malachi Sheahan III, writing an open letter to Epic in Vascular Specialist, likened the logic to Philip Morris's decades-long strategy of denying the relationship between cigarettes and lung cancer: "The easiest way to defend a product's role in causing harm is to deny the very relationship. Blur the lines."
The criticism is not unfair. But it is incomplete. Epic's comprehensiveness — the very quality that makes it cumbersome — is also the quality that makes it irreplaceable. Penn Medicine's CIO described the alternative: thirty-plus specialty EMRs, thirty-plus contracts, thirty-plus maintenance agreements. "When you're trying to run a complex health system," he said, "integration trumps interoperability every day." Epic's switching costs are astronomical — Partners HealthCare (now Mass General Brigham) spent $1.6 billion on implementation alone, more than the cost of several of its buildings — and its data moat deepens with every year of use. Each hospital bed running Epic generates approximately $2,800 in annual recurring revenue. The marriage is permanent.
Faulkner has, in recent years, shown more willingness to address usability. Epic sends its engineers on immersion trips to operating rooms across the country to watch the real-life application of their software. "You might faint," she has warned them — it has happened — "but you watch the OR to see how our software can do better." At her 2024 Users Group Meeting keynote, she invoked the New York Times Wordle as a design aspiration: "That's what we're trying to do for our software. Figure out how to turn them into a game, to make them more fun, to learn."
Whether this represents genuine responsiveness or strategic brand management is, like many things about Epic, a question the evidence does not definitively resolve.
Wonka's Castle
The campus at Verona is 2,000 miles from Silicon Valley. This is not a coincidence.
When other technology companies in the 1980s were choosing sleek, modern buildings, Faulkner picked an old Victorian home. When Epic outgrew Madison and moved to Verona in 2005, Faulkner did not build a glass-and-steel monument to corporate rationality. She built something that industry executives and former employees have likened to "a techie's Disney World." The comparison is not metaphorical. The campus was designed in part by Cuningham, the architecture firm that also worked on the Disney theme parks.
All twenty-eight office buildings have fantastical themes: The Wizard of Oz, Alice in Wonderland, Harry Potter, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. They are grouped into mini-campuses — Prairie Campus, Wizards Academy, Storybook Campus. A metal wizard stands in the courtyard of one castle. Giant chocolate chips mark the entryway to a faux chocolate factory. There is a treehouse with a swing bridge. An Indiana Jones–style tunnel. A Star Wars–themed conference room. An "intergalactic hallway" illuminated like a corridor in a space station. In April 2024, Epic broke ground on its sixth mini-campus, Other Worlds, inspired by The Lord of the Rings and The Chronicles of Narnia.
The whimsy is deliberate. Faulkner has always insisted on individual offices for employees rather than open floor plans — "it pays back in spades in productivity," she has said — and on buildings flooded with natural light. The campus is meant to recruit: Epic's greatest operational challenge is attracting top engineering talent to a small town in Wisconsin with punishing winters. The themed buildings, the five-year sabbatical (a month off with round-trip airfares for two to a destination of your choice, plus per diems), the carousel — these are not eccentricities. They are infrastructure.
Dr. Eric Dickson, CEO of UMass Memorial Health, who has known Faulkner for twenty years, offered the most economical description anyone has managed: "a female cross between
Bill Gates and Willy Wonka."
Work Church
Once a month, most of Epic's 14,000 employees pack into the underground auditorium called Deep Space for a mandatory all-hands meeting that some jokingly call "work church." Executives review company news. They discuss objectives. And then — invariably, unfailingly, as though the corporate calendar were built around it — someone leads a grammar lesson.
Whether it's acceptable to end a sentence with a preposition. When to use "who" versus "whom." The difference between "effect" and "affect." Faulkner, who minored in English at Dickinson, is the company's self-appointed "grammaritician." "Just because we're programmers," she has told employees, "don't assume we're not literate."
The grammar lessons are not a quirk. They are a signal — part of a culture that is simultaneously rigorous, eccentric, and deeply controlled. Faulkner's philosophies are not suggested; they are inscribed. The ten commandments. The motto: Do good. Have fun. Make money — in that order. The injunction to think "Yes, if…" instead of "No, because." The Greek myth of Atalanta, invoked at employee orientations: don't be distracted by golden apples; keep your focus on the finish line.
Epic's hiring process for software developers is equally idiosyncratic. Faulkner does not interview candidates; she tests them. The origin of this practice: her very first programmer hire, who claimed to be excellent, who believed himself excellent, and who, upon receiving his first assignment, declared, "No human being could do this." Faulkner told him she could do it in four hours. After that mismatch, she turned to her fifteen-year-old son and paid him five dollars to create a test that Epic could administer to developer candidates. The company used that test — or a descendant of it — for years.
"If I had to guess," Faulkner said when asked how her employees would describe her, "people would say I'm hardworking, demanding of good work from others, visionary and outspoken." She paused to distinguish between outspoken and honest: "One is being assertive. I will speak up. When I go to a meeting, I may be one of the people who is comfortable speaking up. But then it also goes with the honesty: I might ask the hard questions."
Her leadership philosophy is consultative but not democratic. "It's important to get feedback from others before making a decision. But just because you get others' opinions doesn't mean it's a democracy. You gather all the information but in the end you're the leader and it's your decision."
She prefers "congratulations" to "thank you." The distinction matters to her: "To me, 'thank you' makes it a personal thing, like you did it for me, and I don't like to take that from a person unless it was something they did for me."
The Interoperability Wars
The story of the girl who died in Milwaukee catalyzed Care Everywhere, but the politics of interoperability — the ability of different health systems to share patient data seamlessly — have been far messier than the origin story suggests.
In January 2020, as the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT prepared to finalize rules requiring EHR companies to make their software more interoperable and to give patients free access to their data through third-party smartphone applications, Faulkner emailed hospital CEOs across the country urging them to sign a letter opposing the regulation. "HHS needs to hear from you so they understand that you feel these issues are important," the letter read. "Very little time is left."
About sixty health systems signed. The letter argued that the proposed rule was "overly burdensome" and would "endanger patient privacy." Former Wisconsin Governor Tommy Thompson wrote an op-ed denouncing the rules on behalf of hometown company Epic. Cynthia Fisher, a patient advocate on HHS's Health IT Advisory Committee, called Epic's stated concerns "a smokescreen to protect their interests."
The largest technology companies — Apple, Microsoft, Google — took the opposite stance, favoring the rules in part because greater interoperability could help them move into the $3.5 trillion healthcare sector. Epic's critics saw the company's opposition as a classic monopolist's defense of switching costs: the harder it is for patients to move their data, the stickier Epic's product becomes.
The truth is muddier. Epic had, by 2020, built the largest interoperability network in the country. Care Everywhere processed 30 million queries every 30 hours. The company had co-founded Carequality, a national vendor-neutral interoperability network. By 2025, more than 400 Epic hospitals and 7,000 Epic clinics were live on TEFCA, the government-sponsored Trusted Exchange Framework. An Epic spokesperson noted, pointedly, that Oracle Health's competing CommonWell network didn't go live until 2014 — six years after Epic launched Care Everywhere.
But the opposition to the ONC rule revealed a tension Faulkner has never fully resolved: between the genuine patient-centeredness that drives her best instincts and the competitive logic of a company whose dominance depends, in part, on the difficulty of leaving its ecosystem. Seema Verma, then Oracle Health's general manager, offered the bluntest assessment: "I learned long ago that when someone shows you who they are, it is best to believe them the first time."
The Anti-MBA
Faulkner has never had an MBA. She considers this an advantage.
"I never got an MBA, which I think is a really good thing," she told CNBC in 2025. "They would have taught me, 'Here's how you do venture capital.' We didn't do it. 'Here's how you go public.' We didn't do it. 'Here's how you do budgets.' We don't have budgets. We say, if you need it, buy it. If you don't need it, don't buy it."
This is not anti-intellectualism. Faulkner reads voraciously — science fiction, mostly, curled up by a fire with hot chocolate. She took multi-day business courses. She studied leadership. But she is constitutionally opposed to received wisdom, to frameworks that assume the goal is shareholder return, to the entire apparatus of business-school orthodoxy that treats going public as the natural endpoint of entrepreneurial success.
When visitors recently asked some Epic staffers what the company's EBITDA was, the staffers looked at each other blankly. They had no idea. They didn't even know what the acronym stood for. "I was delighted to hear that story," Faulkner wrote in her blog.
Epic's January all-hands meeting features a twenty-minute year-in-review video. It covers the number of surgical errors prevented. The number of babies born with Epic's Stork software. The number of times — 66 million in 2023 — clinicians changed orders after a contraindicated drug popped up on screen. About ten seconds of the video address the previous year's financials.
"Not being publicly traded, not being VC or PE owned, allows us this great freedom," she wrote. The freedom to think, as she told her Users Group Meeting in 2024, in terms of twenty-five to fifty years. The freedom to develop features before anyone asks for them — MyChart, the patient portal that now has more than 325 million users, was never requested by a customer. Neither was Care Everywhere. "It was just us deciding to do those things," she said.
The competitors she has outlasted or surpassed — Cerner (now absorbed into Oracle for $28 billion), McKesson, Allscripts, athenahealth — were all led, she has noted, by men with MBAs and economics degrees. "I'm a techie," she told the Cap Times. "And that's the key difference. Those guys were taught things like go public, make mergers and acquisitions. What was I taught? How to program."
Roots & Wings
In 2015, Faulkner signed the Giving Pledge —
Warren Buffett and Bill Gates's compact with the world's wealthiest — committing 99 percent of her assets to philanthropy. She has been methodical about following through.
She has never cashed a single share for herself. Instead, she sells her nonvoting Epic shares back to the company and redirects the proceeds to Roots & Wings, the family foundation she established with her husband Gordon. The foundation provides grants to nonprofits supporting low-income children and families. In 2020, Roots & Wings distributed $15 million to 115 organizations. By 2023, that figure had grown to $67 million across 305 organizations. Faulkner's target: $100 million in annual giving by 2027.
The name comes from a question she once asked her young children: what two things do they need from their parents? They said: food and love. She translated this into the foundation's philosophy: roots — food, warmth, shelter, healthcare, education — and wings, the freedom those foundations enable. The Seattle-based foundation, launched in 2020 under the leadership of their daughter Shana Dall'Osto, makes grants nationally, with a focus on Wisconsin, Washington, and Oregon.
To manage the massive outflow of wealth from share sales without destabilizing the company, Faulkner set up a trust to govern the stock sell-back process. The architecture is characteristically precise: voting shares remain locked, ensuring private ownership in perpetuity. Only nonvoting shares are liquidated. The mechanism ensures that the money leaves her personal estate while the company's governance structure remains untouched.
Of the 256 billionaires who have signed the Giving Pledge, reportedly only nine are actually following through with their promises. Faulkner appears determined to be among them.
My goal in pledging 99 percent of my assets to philanthropy is to help others with roots—food, warmth, shelter, healthcare, education—so they, too, can have wings.
Succession and the Trust
Faulkner turned eighty-two in August 2025. She has no plans to retire. "I enjoy what I do," she has said, which is both a statement of fact and a structural reality: the company's identity is so profoundly entangled with its founder's that the question of what happens next is, for Epic's 3,600+ hospital customers, existential.
Sources told CNBC in 2025 that the likely successor is Sumit Rana, who was named president the previous August. Rana, a longtime Epic executive who previously served as senior vice president of research and development, represents continuity — but the real safeguard, in Faulkner's design, is not any individual leader. It is the trust.
Her voting shares will pass, upon her death, into a trust governed by a voting committee: her husband Gordon, her three children, and five longtime Epic employees, though she has said she may add more voices. The trust's rules are explicit. The committee cannot vote to take the company public. It cannot vote for the company to be acquired. Three CEOs from customer health systems — the "trust protectors" — have standing to sue anyone who violates these provisions.
She has even specified that the trust's telephone hold music should be classical. "I like classical music," she explained, as though this were sufficient justification for embedding an aesthetic preference into a governance document.
It is, by any standard, an extraordinary arrangement — a founder engineering her values into the legal infrastructure of a company so thoroughly that they should persist for generations. Whether this constitutes visionary stewardship or a kind of corporate embalming depends on one's view of whether Faulkner's instincts will remain correct in a healthcare landscape transformed by AI, by consumer expectations, by competitors who may yet find a way past Epic's moat.
She is betting that they will. She has been betting that for forty-six years.
The Yellow Brick Road
At the 2019 Users Group Meeting, with 11,000 people packed into Deep Space, Faulkner appeared in bell-bottom jeans and a flowy shirt — the UGM theme that year was the 1970s — and reflected on her younger self. "People often think I was a hippie," she said, "but I have no idea what marijuana smells like. I was more of a nerd than a hippie, and more specifically, a math nerd."
She told the story of Epic's first headquarters, the basement where the first meetings were held with a handful of people. She described the company's introduction of the first graphical-user-interface medical record in 1994. She talked about interoperability, about the comprehensive health record, about genomics and social determinants of health and lab-grown meat and driverless cars. She talked about saving 100,000 lives.
Then she talked about grammar.
She is, at eighty-two, still running the company she started in a basement when Jimmy Carter was president. Still wearing comfortable clothes. Still cutting her own hair, or at least still identifying with the person who did. Still declining the MBA, the IPO, the acquisition, the venture capital, the public market, the suits, the stockings, the heels. "High heels hurt," she once said. "Stockings — stockings are probably like ties. They constrain your thinking."
Each year at the Users Group Meeting, she appears in costume —
Lucille Ball one year, the Mad Hatter another, the Scarecrow from
The Wizard of Oz. Twelve thousand people watch her. She is the most powerful woman in healthcare, the richest self-made female technology founder in America, the custodian of 325 million patient records, and she is dressed as a fictional character, in a building designed to look like a chocolate factory, on a campus in a Wisconsin town with a population of 14,000, talking about prepositions.
Outside, cranes rise above the Wisconsin fields. Epic is still building.
