Medtronic: Earl Bakken's Metronome Pacemaker, Recalls and the Covidien Deal

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Medtronic was founded in 1949 by Earl Bakken and his brother-in-law Palmer Hermundslie as a Minneapolis medical equipment repair shop that mostly fixed centrifuges. On Halloween night 1957 a power outage across Minnesota and western Wisconsin cut power to a wall-plugged pacemaker, and a pediatric heart patient of surgeon C. Walton Lillehei died. Lillehei brought the problem to Bakken, who modified the circuit of a transistorized musical metronome into the first battery-powered wearable pacemaker, a four-inch box taped to the chest with wires through the skin. By 1960 Medtronic had a fully implantable pacemaker. Its plant in Tolochenaz, Switzerland, opened in 1997, makes one in five pacemakers implanted worldwide. The company expanded into diabetes by buying MiniMed in 2001, whose 2016 MiniMed 670G was the first hybrid closed-loop system for type 1 diabetes, into spine with Kyphon in 2007, and into neuromodulation for pain and Parkinson's disease.

Medtronic today has about $33 billion in annual revenue and 95,000 employees. In 2008 researchers showed in a lab that they could remotely control a Medtronic cardiac implant, and in 2011 Jay Radcliffe hacked a Medtronic insulin pump live at Black Hat; Medtronic said its devices were safe. In 2014 and 2015 it bought Ireland-based Covidien for $42.9 billion, the largest corporate tax inversion in history, which CEO Omar Ishrak defended as strategic. In March 2026 it took its diabetes unit public on the Nasdaq as MiniMed Group Inc. and opened an exchange offer for its remaining stake.

• Medtronic recalled its Sprint Fidelis defibrillator leads in 2007 after they fractured at unacceptable rates.
• A February 2020 recall of about 322,000 MiniMed insulin pumps over a faulty retainer ring was linked to about 2,000 injuries and one death, and in 2021 the FDA told doctors to stop new implants of the HVAD heart pump.
• In May 2008 the spine unit paid $75 million to settle a whistleblower suit alleging it pushed kyphoplasty as an inpatient procedure to raise Medicare billing.
• A 2012 Time magazine report found a 75.1 percent average profit margin on Medtronic's spine products.
• In March 2020 Medtronic publicly shared its portable ventilator design specifications so other manufacturers could build them during COVID-19.