A Spine-Surgery Robot Turned This Entrepreneur Into A Billionaire. But How Well Does His Robot Work? (Forbes)
When David C. Paul traveled to Phoenix in 2013, he saw the future of spinal surgery: a robot prototype called the Excelsius GPS. Nicholas Theodore, one of the robot’s inventors, remembers Paul being immediately impressed. “This is going to change everything,” Paul said, according to Theodore. A few months later, Paul bought Theodore’s company, Excelsius Surgical—and the robot with it—for an undisclosed sum.
Paul, 51, couldn’t have hoped for more from the purchase. Since 2014, shares of Globus Medical, Paul’s publicly traded device manufacturer, have more than doubled. Just since the robot received FDA clearance in August 2017, the stock has climbed 65%. Paul owns nearly a quarter of the firm. That stake and recent stock sales add up to a $1.3 billion fortune. Paul, who stepped down as CEO and moved to the executive chairman role last year while recovering from what the company referred to in a press release as a “health condition,” still maintains tight control over the business—owning 76% of the company’s voting shares, according to the latest proxy. (Paul, through a Glob...
