Martine Rothblatt: She founded SiriusXM, a religion and a biotech. For starters.
By Neely Tucker December 12
Washington Post Magazine
http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/magazine/martine-rothblatt-she-founded-siriusxm-a-religion-and-a-biotech-for-starters/2014/12/11/5a8a4866-71ab-11e4-ad12-3734c461eab6_story.html (http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/magazine/martine-rothblatt-she-founded-siriusxm-a-religion-and-a-biotech-for-starters/2014/12/11/5a8a4866-71ab-11e4-ad12-3734c461eab6_story.html)
In the late 1980s, Rothblatt conceived of and created a crazy company devoted to the idea of worldwide satellite radio. Today that's Sirius XM. It's in your car's dashboard, next to the satellite navigation device ... and she was president of Geostar, the first company to market that, too. Her college thesis became the first private satellite phone company.
"She has to my knowledge a perfect track record in making [her] visions real," Kurzweil writes in an e-mail.
Rothblatt dropped out of the satellite orbit because her and Bina's daughter was diagnosed at 5 with what is now called pulmonary arterial hypertension, an incurable lung disease. It progressively narrows the lung's arteries to the point of death. By 12, Jenesis would faint all the time, her life seeping away in intensive care units.
So Rothblatt sold out of Sirius, set to studying biology — the last such course she had taken was in 10th grade — and formed U.T.
Today, Jenesis is 30, in good health and does film-production work for the now-$6 billion firm. Martine led the company to developing a new FDA-approved pill for pulmonary arterial hypertension, Orenitram ("Martine Ro," backward). The stock price soared, and so did her incentive package.
Amid all this, Martine and Bina have been married for 32 years, before and after Rothblatt's gender surgery.