Judy Faulkner has said she can see herself running Epic at 100.
She is 82 now. Last week I watched her walk out in front of twenty thousand people at her company's annual meeting in Verona, Wisconsin, dressed for the state fair theme, and open the show like a woman with no particular interest in wrapping things up. This is part two of a three-part series that started because I attended that meeting and could not stop thinking about what I saw. Last week was the founding story, a giant built out of forty-seven years of refusals. Same disclosure as last week: I was there as a working physician whose world runs on Epic. Nobody paid me, and nobody at Epic knows or cares what I write on Saturdays.
This week is about the question everyone in that auditorium was quietly asking.
What happens when she's gone?
The plan
Most founders answer that question with a name. Judy answered it with machinery.
She holds every one of Epic's voting shares. When she dies, those shares transfer into a trust governed by nine people: her husband Gordon, a retired pediatrician, their three children, and five longtime senior Epic employees. The trust does not ask those nine people what they think Epic should do. It tells them. The rules are written down and legally binding. They can never vote to take Epic public. They can never vote to sell it or to acquire another company. They cannot create new stock to weasel around the rules. The next CEO must be a longtime Epic employee and a software developer.
And then there is my favorite part. A separate group of health system CEOs serve as what she calls trust protectors, and their job, in her own words, is to sue anyone who does not vote according to the rules.
Read that again. She has pre-hired her own opposition. She has arranged, while alive, for people to take her own family and her own executives to court if they ever betray the blueprint.
The money side is just as deliberate. The financial value of her stock is separated from the vote and flows to charity through her family foundation. She has pledged away 99 percent of her wealth. What remains is not an inheritance. It is a set of instructions.
The part that got me
Here is what I cannot shake, and it is not the legal engineering.
Judy once mentioned reading that the average person dies about two years after leaving the workforce, and that she worries about what happens to people when they retire. Why am I waking up in the morning, what is my day going to be. She asks herself the opposite question: how do I get everything done.
I run a longevity practice, so people expect me to talk about protein and VO2 max and sleep. Fine. But I will tell you what I actually see at the top of the table and across the desk. The people who fall apart fastest after 65 are almost never the ones with the worst labs. They are the ones who retired from something instead of to something. The job ends, the structure ends, the reason ends, and the body gets the message and follows.
Judy built the most extreme answer to that problem I have ever seen. She did not plan her retirement. She planned her continuity.
She isn't trying to live forever. She's trying to make her purpose outlive her, and there is a difference.
Most of us do neither. We do not plan the exit and we do not plan the purpose. We just work until something breaks and then improvise.
The fair case against the plan
Now the honest counterargument, because it is strong.
A company designed so that it can never be sold, never merge, and never fundamentally change course is a company betting that its founder's judgment will still be right in 2050. Maybe it will be. But monuments have a way of becoming mausoleums. The same rules that protect Epic from raiders also handcuff every future leader to the instincts of a woman who wrote them in a different era of medicine. Succession plans this rigid have a mixed record in history, and the people who inherit them do not get a vote. Her likely successors are brilliant. They are also inheriting a constitution they cannot amend.
And there is a softer critique. Planning to work until 100 is inspiring right up until it becomes a way of never letting go, and I am not wise enough to know which one this is. Neither are you. Probably neither is she.
The bottom line
You and I are not going to set up purpose trusts with standing legal armies. That is billionaire-grade estate planning and most of it does not translate.
But one piece translates directly, and it is the piece nobody does. Everyone I know has a financial plan for the back half of life. Almost nobody has a purpose plan. We plan the money like adults and leave the meaning to chance, and then we are surprised when the strongest predictor of a bad final decade turns out to be an empty calendar and a missing reason.
I don't know if Judy Faulkner will make it to 100 at the helm. But she has already answered the question most of us are afraid to ask out loud: what, exactly, is supposed to get you out of bed after the job stops needing you?
So here's my question for you this week: if you stopped working tomorrow, what would you be retiring to? Not from. To.
Reply and tell me. I can't write back to everyone, but I read every single one.
That's all for this week.
See you next Saturday for the finale: the woman who built the electronic chart stood on a stage this month and told us what she thinks humans still have that the machines never will. As someone who lives inside her software, I have thoughts.