Henry Elkus
Henry Elkus is Founder and CEO of Helena. He cares immensely about creating systems that can be leveraged to enact global, scalable, and systemic change. Henry dropped out of Yale in his second year to lead Helena full time.
As a byproduct of his work at Helena, Henry developed a passion and hobby of collecting book recommendations from the Helena community, then documenting each book as he finishes them one-by-one.
Click here to take a look at what he’s reading. (Instagram page: @elklist)
Helena is a global problem solving organization. Its purpose is to identify potential solutions to critical global problems and directly implement them through individual projects. Helena’s past and current work has addressed elements of climate change, governance reform, exponential technologies, existential risk mitigation and more.
Helena’s “America in One Room” (A1R) project was one of the most significant political experiments in American History. A1R brought the most representative sample of the United States electorate ever assembled to a single location for a four-day deliberation on the most critical issues facing the country. The project and its publicly-released results were globally covered, including in a front-page, special feature of the New York Times that featured portraits of nearly every participant. Cited by global leaders including Presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton as a needed method to address structural issues in modern democracy, A1R looks to continue expanding its reach domestically and internationally.
In response to COVID-19, Helena led two projects. During the early months of the pandemic, Helena addressed critical breakdowns in the supply chain of vital protective equipment, directly purchasing/financing and routing more over 37 million masks, gloves, gowns and other PPE into the hands of frontline workers are nearly 100 hospitals and care facilities across the US. In parallel, Helena built The Covid Network, a real-time data platform quantifying COVID’s spread across the United States and current PPE needs for individual hospitals. The platform was quickly adopted by health systems and suppliers across the country, including the US Air Force.
Through its for-profit arm, Helena operates projects to address system global issues through investment, company building and more.
Helena is the largest investor in Phaidra, a company using deep-learning artificial intelligence to autonomously operate some of the world’s most energy-intensive and complex industrial processes. Helena’s other portfolio companies include Twin Health, a digital twin artificial intelligence platform for the reversal of Type 2 diabetes and other chronic diseases, Commonwealth Fusion Systems, a leading nuclear fusion company using high temperature superconducting magnets developed in collaboration with MIT, Energy Vault, a breakthrough technology in grid-scale energy storage that produces high round-trip efficiency, variable duration and cost competitive gravity storage systems and Lykos Therapeutics, formerly MAPS PBC, a leading developer of psychedelic therapies for intractable diagnoses.
Helena’s second project, “Shield,” catalyzed state and federal action to help protect the North American electrical grid from threats due to solar storms and cyber-attack, including a 2019 Presidential Executive Order. It’s first project, “Factory in the Sky” supported the launch and scale of the world’s first commercial carbon capture plants.
Helena works alongside a small group of exceptional leaders called Helena Members. The members represent Helena’s core ability to analyze global trends and problems, source and develop potential solutions to those problems, and implement those solutions. The members include Four-Star Generals, artificial intelligence experts, Fortune 100 CEOs, Nobel Peace Prize and Scientific Laureates, Academy Award Winners, former CIA Directors, leading Academics, NGO Leaders, explorers, and more.
Outside of Helena, Henry serves as Social Entrepreneur in Residence at The Boston Consulting Group and a Special Advisor to the Berggruen Institute. He also was named to the 2020 Forbes 30 Under 30 list. At 18, Henry became the youngest panelist on the Wall Street Journal’s online “experts” panel on small business. Until 2014, Henry competed internationally as a ski racer.