The world’s last billionaire is a transgender woman who flies a helicopter and is determined to cure her daughter’s illness.
By Richard J. ChangForbes Staff
In1996, Martine Rothblatt Her six-year-old daughter was diagnosed with pulmonary arterial hypertension, a rare lung and heart disease with no cure. Undeterred, Rothblatt, co-founder of Sirius Satellite Radio, launched her own biotech company with the goal of finding a cure.
“There’s nothing worse than finding out your daughter is going to die,” Rothblatt said. Forbes in 2018. “I just said I would find a way, otherwise she would die, because everyone who had had this disease before had died.”
Nearly three decades later, Rothblatt’s daughter is healthy and in her 30s. Meanwhile, shares of the now-publicly traded company, United Therapeutics, have risen 54 times their price when they went public in 1999. This year alone, the stock has surged, up 50% so far in 2024 and 40% since April 30, enough to make Rothblatt the world’s new billionaire.
The Silver Spring, Maryland-based company generated $2.1 billion in sales last year, largely from sales of five FDA-approved drugs to help people like Rothblatt’s daughter treat pulmonary arterial hypertension (PAH). Investors have been cheering United Therapeutics since it announced a $1 billion accelerated stock repurchase program in March, signaling that it is bullish on its pulmonary hypertension drugs. Enthusiasm over a 41% year-over-year rise in revenue for its blockbuster drug, Tyvaso, is also driving up its stock price.
Rothblatt, 69, has led the company, which now has a market capitalization of $14.7 billion, as its CEO since its inception. She has also been instrumental in building its subsidiary Revivicor into xenotransplantation, specifically the manufacturing of pig organs for transplant into humans with end-stage kidney and heart disease.
“There are a lot of people on the waiting list for a kidney or a heart,” said Joseph Thome, senior research analyst at TD Cowen. “They’re ready to take advantage of it.”
No one has benefited more financially from United Therapeutics’ success than Rothblatt, who was long one of the wealthiest self-made women in America. Forbes“Martine Ro estimated her net worth at $390 million in 2015, after the company found an effective treatment for PAH with Orenitram (“Martine Ro” backwards). In 2021, with United Therapeutics’ stock soaring, she was worth about $585 million. Today, with her 650,000 shares, plus options to acquire even more shares, money accumulated over her decades of business, and homes in multiple states,Forbes estimates that Rothblatt’s net worth has reached the $1 billion mark, making her one of only 35 self-made female billionaires in America.
HeIt’s been a winding road Born in San Diego in 1954, she hitchhiked across the country playing music (she plays piano, flute, and drums) while studying communications at UCLA. A tour of a satellite facility in the Seychelles got her fascinated with the idea of using satellite networks to broadcast music to listeners around the world. After returning to the United States, she earned a joint law degree and MBA from UCLA and eventually took a job as a telecommunications attorney for a firm in Washington, D.C.
In 1990, she co-founded Sirius Satellite Radio, helping create satellite-to-car broadcasting, and led its 1993 IPO. Three years later, doctors said her daughter had pulmonary arterial hypertension, or PAH, which at the time had a high mortality rate within two years of diagnosis. As many as 50,000 people in the United States have PAH, a progressive disease in which abnormally high blood pressure affects the arteries in the lungs and heart. Rothblatt sold $3 million worth of SiriusXM stock and gave the money to doctors to find a treatment. When that didn’t work, she started her own company, United Therapeutics, to find a cure. She took it public in 1999, in a $66 million IPO of a small biotech company with revenues of $54,000, thanks to an orphan drug grant from the FDA.
Three years later, United Therapeutics won approval for its first PAH treatment, Remodulin, in the U.S., Canada, and Israel. The company has created three other FDA-approved treatments for the condition, including one in once-daily pill form. Then came Tyvaso, a treatment that relaxes blood vessels, allowing blood to flow more easily during exercise. In 2022, United Therapeutics won approval for a dry powder formulation, called Tyvaso DPI, that comes in portable inhaler cartridges and helped push the company’s sales to more than $2 billion in 2023.
Earlier this year, investors were concerned that another PAH treatment, Merck’s Winrevair, would compete directly with Tyvaso, but the launch of Winrevair has led doctors to use the two drugs in combination rather than as a single treatment, says Ash Verma, executive director of biotech equity research at UBS.
“It’s a big bet, but it can be an interesting business,” Verma says. “There’s virtually no competition.”
Tyvaso is also in Phase 3 clinical trials as a treatment for idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, a disease that causes scarring of the lungs. United Therapeutics said it expects data in the second half of 2025, earlier than investors initially anticipated.
In 2011, Rothblatt also branched out into supplying lungs for organ transplants. United Therapeutics acquired xenotransplantation technology company Revivicor (which created the first cloned mammal, Dolly the sheep) to develop organs grown in pigs. In 2022 and 2023, United Therapeutics successfully transplanted two hearts grown in genetically modified pigs. It announced the first successful transplant of one of its pig kidneys into a living human in April and is spending $100 million on a new facility to further study the viability of xenotransplantation.
If United Therapeutics If she succeeds in saving lives through xenotransplantation, it would mark a new milestone in Rothblatt’s career. Perhaps the most high-profile transgender CEO in the United States, she underwent sex reassignment surgery in 1994 and has spent decades advocating for LGBTQ rights, including speaking out against North Carolina’s controversial bathroom bill in 2016. She is a licensed helicopter pilot, helped build the world’s first full-size electric helicopter and owns at least eight homes in four states.
A transhumanist, Rothblatt believes that one day people will be able to upload their minds to computers with the ability to create computer-controlled doppelgangers. She co-founded the Terasem movement, a religious organization, in 2004 to spread these ideas with her 42-year-old wife, Bina (in whose image Rothblatt built a humanoid robot with a head and shoulders).
It’s just one of many ambitious gambles that have driven Rothblatt over decades to dabble in everything from satellite radio to growing pig organs to help treat her daughter’s illness, making her a billionaire along the way.
“Instead of my daughter having no chance of getting an organ,” Rothblatt said in 2016, “there will be enough organs for everyone.”
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