Epic is not focusing on maximizing profits but rather on “creating software that helps take care of patients,” according to founder and CEO Judy Faulkner.
During a recent interview with Ms. Faulkner, Freakonomics Radio host Stephen Dubner pointed to the EHR giant’s roughly $5.8 billion in annual revenue and said: “My conclusion is you are not profit maximizing at all.” Ms. Faulkner responded that she agreed “entirely.”
“Plainly, that’s a choice we make,” she said. “We have enough money as revenue to run our company and be successful. Our customers need it more than we do, and so we don’t want to misuse them. … I say you shouldn’t concentrate or focus on the revenue side, but you can’t be stupid about it.”
She added that profit “isn’t a goal; it’s a side effect.” (An Epic spokesperson told Becker’s the company’s revenue increased to $6.7 billion in 2025.)
Part of this is a function of Epic remaining privately owned. The company has famously never gone public, taken venture capital or private equity funding, or acquired another business.
“I remember in the beginning of Epic looking up good companies, and reading what their shareholders wrote about those good companies,” Ms. Faulkner told the podcast. “The shareholders were only interested in return on equity, not what value the company was giving to the world, and they were vicious about the company whenever there wasn’t the return on equity that they wanted. And I thought, ‘Who wants owners who are like that?'”
And it appears that will remain so. As part of Ms. Faulkner’s succession plan, Epic’s voting shares — which all belong to her — will, upon her death, transfer to a trust governed by her husband, three children, and five longtime senior managers. A trio of health system CEOs from Epic’s CEO Council has promised to sue anyone who doesn’t vote in accordance with Ms. Faulkner’s wishes: that Epic never becomes publicly traded or gets acquired, that new stock isn’t created to subvert the rules.
While not naming the health system CEOs, noting that they recently changed, Ms. Faulkner told the podcaster “they’re people who volunteered to do this and were very interested in doing it.”
Not that Ms. Faulkner, 82, is planning to retire. She told Mr. Dubner she could envision herself still running the company at the age of 100.
Another big reason Epic looks beyond the bottom line is Ms. Faulkner herself. While she’s worth an estimated $7.8 billion, she told Mr. Dubner she has “one house,” “one husband” and “one car” (a Tesla, because she likes the self-driving feature). While she has only one dog, she said she’d have more if her husband would allow it.
She has pledged to give away the vast majority of her fortune. She donates the proceeds (about $100 million annually) of the sales of nonvoting shares to her foundation, Roots & Wings, with the shares then offered back to Epic employees.
Her strategy has worked: Ms. Faulkner said on the podcast that a customer has never sued Epic, and only one client has ever left (before eventually coming back). She argued that her company has helped keep GDP spending on healthcare under control by saving health systems money from not having to rely on so many applications.
Epic has faced antitrust lawsuits in recent years — the company now owns more than 40% of the hospital EHR market — which Ms. Faulkner said in the episode seems “weird” because the company started with “three halftime people in a basement.”
“Our customers should be free to work with any third party they want to work with,” she told the podcaster. “I have often said to them, folks, ‘Do you know what you bought?’ Because our system is big, and sometimes what happens is they buy something that they already have bought from us, and they don’t even realize that they have those capabilities that they went out for. So sometimes a lot of our job is to make sure they know what they bought so they can make an intelligent decision.”
She told Mr. Dubner that her leadership technique stems from something her mother told her when she was heading off to college: “Make the world a better place.”
“And I remember thinking, ‘Oh, that’s a big burden to put on an 18-year-old’s shoulders,'” Ms. Faulkner said. “Now I look back at it and think she was so wise to do that.”
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