Martine Rothblatt: The Transgender CEO Who Topped America's Pay Charts

From the TI archives — originally published September 2014.

In 2013, the highest-paid female CEO in America was Martine Rothblatt, the founder and CEO of United Therapeutics, with total compensation of $38.2 million — nearly all of it in stock options tied to the company's performance.

Rothblatt's path to the top of that list is one of the most unusual in corporate America. Born in Chicago in 1954 and raised in Southern California, she built a career first in communications law and satellite technology — she founded Sirius Satellite Radio — and holds a Ph.D. in medical ethics, a J.D., and an M.B.A. In 1982 she married Bina Aspen; in 1994, at 40, she transitioned and became Martine.

The biotech chapter was personal. Rothblatt's daughter had been diagnosed with pulmonary arterial hypertension, a rare and then nearly untreatable disease. Rothblatt founded United Therapeutics to find a treatment — and built a company around the search.

The profile that introduced her to the wider public that year, in New York magazine, ended on a note of unusual candor. Asked about topping a list of women's pay, she said she couldn't quite claim the achievement in the usual way: "I can't claim that what I have achieved is equivalent to what a woman has achieved. For the first half of my life, I was male."

She also wrote. Just after her transition, she published The Apartheid of Sex (1995), a manifesto arguing that gender categories are as arbitrary as the legal divisions of race once were: "There are five billion people in the world and five billion unique sexual identities." Two decades of biotechnology, satellite launches, and transhumanist philosophy later, that line reads less like provocation than biography.

In 2014, roughly five percent of Fortune 500 companies were run by women — and even at the top, the pay gap ran the other direction. Rothblatt's story cut against both patterns at once, and resisted easy framing from any direction. (Fast Company profile)