Judy Faulkner
Source of wealth: Healthcare software
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Modules
Biography
Judy Faulkner founded medical-record software provider Epic Systems in a Wisconsin basement in 1979.
Faulkner, a computer programmer, is CEO of the $5.7 billion (2024 sales) company, of which she owns an estimated 43%.
Epic supports the medical records of over 250 million patients and is used by top medical centers such as Johns Hopkins and Mayo Clinic.
The company has never raised venture capital or made an acquisition, and develops all its software in-house.
Faulkner signed the Giving Pledge in 2015 and has agreed to eventually give 99% of her assets to a private charitable foundation.
In 2024 she told Forbes that she was regularly selling around $100 million of her Epic shares a year back to the company, with proceeds going to her charitable foundation, Roots & Wings.
Financial Assets
Financial assets information not available.
The Great Lie of Mega-Fortunes: The Case of Judy Faulkner
Billionaires are often presented under the romantic myth of the 'self-made person': a narrative designed to justify opulence as the natural reward for hard work, effort, or ingenuity. However, when confronting such extreme volumes of wealth with macroeconomic reality, the meritocracy narrative completely breaks down. No individual can legitimately generate through personal effort a fortune equivalent to millions of times the average working-class salary. Capital at the top does not grow because of exceptional talent; it expands through an implacable dynamic where accumulated money works exponentially faster than people, devouring the wealth generated by productive labor.
The immense fortune of Judy Faulkner, linked to Technology and 'Healthcare software', has not been built in a free-market vacuum, but through rent-seeking, the use of exclusive elite influence, the consolidation of monopoly positions, or inherited wealth. Far from taking real private risks, billionaire empires structurally depend on state support through direct subsidies, infrastructure use, exploitation of R&D, public contracts, and offshore tax engineering. While this wealth is equivalent to the physical weight of 68 tons of pure gold, the rest of the planet suffers from an artificial scarcity of basic resources. The fact that this wealth is enough to fully fund the public health system of DR Congo, a country with more than 105800000 million inhabitants for 4.3 years, proves that unlimited accumulation is not an entrepreneurial achievement, but the hijacking of democratic sovereignty.