EXTRA TIME MK

AFTER SELLING HER HEALTH CARE COMPANY, BILLIONAIRE MICHELE KANG HAS A NEW GOAL: TRANSFORMING WOMEN'S SPORTS. NOW SHE'S OUT TO PROVE HER THREE SOCCER TEAMS CAN COMPETE WITH THE MEN'S GAME AS A REAL BUSINESS-AND SHE'S WILLING TO SPEND WHATEVER IT TAKES.

- BY JUSTIN BIRNBAUM AND GIGI ZAMORA

SETTLING INTO a gray upholstered chair in her living room in central London beneath an enormous chandelier that makes even the nearby grand piano look compact, Michele Kang finds her mind drifting to the PBS home improvement series This Old House. She is fresh off a meeting with architects-down a glass-encased elevator to the conference room below her five-bedroom Knightsbridge apartment-and she has buildings on the brain.

She enjoys design, she says, clad in a cardinal-red double-breasted Valentino dress coat against the chill of a February afternoon, but she doesn't have the patience to slog through a long television season. "I just want to see the before-and-after picture," says Kang, 65. "Who cares about the middle? I want to see the final product."

Her entire life, Kang has focused on the endgame. Her outcome-oriented approach has made her a phenomenally successful tech entrepreneur-ranking 28th on Forbes' 2025 list of America's Richest Self-Made Women, worth an estimated $1.2 billion. But while she might privately wish that she could skip the process, she's also a woman who, after earning an economics degree from the University of Chicago and an MBA from Yale, meticulously mapped out the next 30 years of her career. She decided she would spend ten years consulting, to learn all aspects of a business, and then a decade as an executive before finally achieving her lifelong dream: becoming a CEO. She checked that last box in 2008 when she founded Cognosante, a health care IT company, which she sold last year for more than $1 billion.