Lululemon’s Founder Is Racing to Cure the Rare Disease Destroying His Muscles

On the outskirts of Silicon Valley, at a private clinic inside a two-story office building near the highway, Chip Wilson was undergoing an experimental medical procedure to retain the use of his legs. Wilson is 68 and has a net worth of $7.1 billion, thanks largely to his development in the late 1990s of a type of yoga pants he could sell to women for $100 a pair. The company he founded, Lululemon Athletica, more or less invented an apparel category, athleisure, which it continued to dominate even after he stepped away in 2013 following some particularly insensitive comments about how the pants looked on some women’s bodies.

Unknown to the public, throughout his long career Wilson was watching his own body slowly waste away from muscular dystrophy. Lying supine as Matt Cook, the clinic’s proprietor, ran an ultrasound wand over his legs, Wilson surveyed the damage the disease had done. Where images of healthy muscles are largely black, with only specks and striations of white indicating fat, Wilson’s were heavily marbled.