Francesco De Meo was born in 1963 in Germany, on the Swabian Jura, to an Italian guest worker father and a German seamstress mother. He spent his childhood and youth alternating between Germany and Italy. After completing his law studies and obtaining his doctorate, he initially worked as a lawyer and managing director of a German consulting firm. In 2000, he joined Helios, a startup hospital operator in Germany. Over the course of two decades, he developed the company into Europe’s leading private hospital group, treating nearly 25 million patients annually with a revenue of 11 billion euros, around 1.5 billion euros in profit, and employing a total of 130,000 people. From 2008 to 2023, he served as CEO of Helios and a member of the Board of the publicly listed healthcare conglomerate Fresenius.