Judy Faulkner

Female

White

Coarse public-record coding; race is a noisy, interpretive category.

European American; a more specific ancestry is not clearly documented

Her maiden name, Greenfield, is a surname associated with (though not exclusive to) Ashkenazi Jewish families, and no source reviewed confirms or discusses her family's religion or ethnic ancestry directly. Coded at the broad regional level rather than guessed; her father's pharmacy and mother's peace-movement work are documented, but not an ethnic identity.

No immigration history documented for either parent.

not established

She attended Moorestown Friends School, a private Quaker school, but no source reviewed states her family's own religious affiliation.

not established

No documented family wealth or property behind the 1979 founding; an educated, professionally employed two-parent household, not a wealthy one.

Epic began in 1979 with three employees in a basement office and about $70,000 in start-up money; growth was funded by client revenue from early on rather than a personal or family income floor.

The hardship was imposed, not chosen. There was nothing to fall back on.

Nothing in the record frames the modest 1979 start as chosen austerity against a standing cushion.

Father Louis Greenfield was an independent pharmacist who ran his own store; mother Del Greenfield was a peace activist affiliated with the South Jersey Peace Center and later director of Oregon Physicians for Social Responsibility, an organization that shared the 1985 Nobel Peace Prize.

A parent worked for themselves, the strongest known predictor of founding.

Her father owned his own pharmacy.

2

A sister who became a physician and a brother who became an attorney.

Born Judith Greenfield in Cherry Hill, New Jersey.

Erlton section of Cherry Hill, New Jersey.

Moorestown Friends School, a private Quaker school; graduated 1961.

Moved from New Jersey to Madison, Wisconsin for graduate school around 1965–67 and stayed, founding Epic there in 1979 and remaining headquartered in the Madison area since.

Dr. Warner Slack and psychiatrist Dr. John Greist, University of Wisconsin–Madison faculty she worked under and with while a graduate student in one of the first computers-in-medicine courses offered anywhere; Greist became her co-founder.

Academic medical-computing research at UW–Madison, where she was developing patient-information software before Epic existed as a company.

Dr. John Greist, a University of Wisconsin–Madison psychiatrist.

22

Approximate age entering the UW–Madison computer science graduate program where she took the computers-in-medicine course.

12

From her 1967 master's to Epic's 1979 founding; her work in the interim is not fully documented in sources reviewed.

Master's degree in computer science, University of Wisconsin–Madison (1967), after a bachelor's degree in mathematics from Dickinson College. She later received an honorary doctorate from UW–Madison's Computer Sciences Department in 2010.

Direct math degree, then a computer science master's; no gap or non-traditional route documented.

UW–Madison's medical school and computer science department supplied her mentors, her co-founder, and the research question — tracking patient information — that became Epic's founding product.

About $70,000 raised from friends and family to found Human Services Computing (later Epic Systems) in 1979.

not established

The $70,000 seed is described as coming from "friends and family" collectively; no source reviewed breaks out how much, if any, came specifically from her own family versus friends or other early backers.

It paid its own way from the start. Revenue came before any outside money.

Epic has never taken venture capital or private equity, never gone public, and has made no acquisitions in its history, building everything in-house. It remains privately held; Faulkner and her family own roughly 42–43 percent.

Never sold equity to outside investors and never listed publicly; ownership and control have stayed with Faulkner and Epic itself throughout.

Grew directly out of her graduate research building patient-tracking software under academic medicine faculty at UW–Madison, not from an outside market observation.

As founder, CEO, and roughly 42–43 percent owner of a private company that has never diluted through outside capital, she holds both economic ownership and operational control without the split that comes from raising venture money.

0

No prior venture, failed or otherwise, is documented before Epic's 1979 founding.

59

Approximate age when Epic won the 2003 Kaiser Permanente contract that moved it into the top tier of health-IT vendors.

A multi-decade U.S. push toward digitizing hospital and clinic records, sharpened by the 2009 HITECH Act's incentive payments for adopting electronic health records, which pulled large health systems toward vendors like Epic through the 2010s.

Built entirely from scratch and grown organically; Epic has made no acquisitions and develops all of its software in-house.

36

Age at Epic's 1979 founding (born August 1943).

47

From the 1979 founding to 2026; she remains founder and CEO.

Electronic health records and health-information software

9600000000

Forbes real-time estimate, September 28, 2026. Epic is privately held, so this is a journalistic estimate of paper equity value (roughly 42–43 percent of the company), not a filing-derived figure. Forbes reported about $7.8B in July 2024, rising toward $9.6B by September 2026 as Epic's estimated value grew; band this figure rather than treating it as precise.

Journalistic estimate

2026

Nearly all of her wealth is unlisted equity in Epic. She reportedly sells around $100 million in Epic shares back to the company in most years, with proceeds directed toward her Giving Pledge commitments.

Wealth held as an appreciating stake in a private company rather than a salary. Epic reported about $6.7 billion in 2025 sales — that is company revenue, not her personal net worth, which is the figure coded in magnitude above.

Widely described as the wealthiest self-made woman in American technology and, per Forbes in 2013, "the most powerful woman in health care." Epic is the largest U.S. electronic-health-records vendor by market share, with records on more than 325 million patients and its MyChart portal used by roughly 150 million of them.

24

From the 1979 founding to the 2003 Kaiser Permanente contract.

Uncapped

Epic faces multiple antitrust suits filed since September 2024, including one from Particle Health alleging Epic restricted health records access to pressure customers away from rival platforms, and one filed by the Texas attorney general in December 2025 alleging Epic maintains an illegal monopoly in the electronic-health-records market. These are allegations in active litigation, not adjudicated findings, and concern the company's market conduct rather than any personal finding against Faulkner.

After

The antitrust suits arrived decades after Epic's 1979 founding and its 2003 Kaiser breakthrough, once Epic already held dominant market share.

Incidental

The wealth mechanism was the 1979 bootstrapped founding and retained ownership; the current antitrust scrutiny concerns Epic's market conduct as an already-dominant incumbent decades later, not how the fortune was originally built.

Legal gray

Reflects contested, unresolved allegations about competitive practices, not an adjudicated wrong.

None

No fine, judgment, or personal liability is documented as of this writing; the suits are pending.

Known internally as a demanding, detail-focused manager — one characterization has it that "working with Judy is like walking on the sun" — and as of 2022 Epic required nearly daily in-office attendance, with a small annual allowance of remote days.

Low key, Demanding, fiercely independent, Detail obsessed

Composite of how business and health-IT press have characterized her over multiple profiles, including a Forbes piece titled "Health Care's Low-Key Billionaire" and another titled "Epic Systems' Tough Billionaire."

Press

Before

Her reputation as a disciplined, independent operator predates the recent antitrust scrutiny by decades.

Mixed

Her reputation for stability, privacy-mindedness, and independence from outside capital has been an asset in winning large, risk-averse hospital-system customers; the same closed, self-contained approach is what critics and regulators now point to as anti-competitive.

The reputation accrued from behaviour rather than being manufactured.

Consistently described as press-shy and Madison-based rather than as someone who built a public persona.

Trusted for decades by large hospital systems and generally well-regarded within Wisconsin business and civic circles; more recently criticized by health-tech competitors, interoperability advocates, and some regulators over allegations — not adjudicated — that Epic's systems resist sharing patient data outward to protect its market position. Faulkner has publicly disputed that framing, including in comments describing federal data-sharing mandates as a threat to patient privacy.