The insurance company CEO who was fired at the 90th minute reveals: how I became a billionaire

Eti Elishakov does not apologize for her ambition, and she has no reason to. The one who started her business path at the age of 12, working in a neighborhood kiosk for 6 shekels an hour to buy Levi's jeans, now manages the insurance company "Libra" that she owns, which is valued at one billion shekels.

The girl who grew up in Holon learned very early what resilience and commitment are, when at the age of only 15 she cared for her mother who was battling bone cancer. The nightly care for her dying mother was not etched in her memory as a trauma, but as a great privilege that demanded early maturity and the ability to withstand the most difficult crises. "Mom would say in Iraqi that I am a 'sabaa', a strong girl," she recalls. "During that period, I matured by ten years. I became a very strong person, resistant to crises, I always sleep well at night, no matter what happens in my life, and I also understood that there are things that are more important than work."

She began her meteoric path in the world of finance as a teller at Discount Bank, and from there she quickly rose to senior management positions and huge salaries of 3.2 million shekels a year. However, the great drama of her life occurred in March 2017, at the moment that was supposed to be the peak of her career. The toast for her appointment as CEO of the insurance company Ayalon had already been scheduled and press releases had been sent out, but power struggles on the board of directors shuffled the cards and led to the cancellation of the appointment at the 90th minute.

Elishakov did not wallow in self-pity. "I got a slap in the face," she explains. "It didn't happen because I'm a woman, but because in life you sometimes get slaps. I had 48 difficult hours, and then I got up. I always get up quickly." Instead of looking for a new job, she decided to translate the disappointment into an unprecedented step and do what no woman in Israel had done before her: establishing an insurance company from scratch.

The road to establishing "Libra" was full of obstacles. The capitalists she approached got cold feet in the face of the closed club of the insurance industry, and some even received explicit threats from competitors who threatened that "if you put money with her, it's like betting on a lottery ticket." Without the backing of tycoons, Elishakov and her husband Haim decided to put all their assets on the line. She shared the risk with him and said:

"If it doesn't work, we go back to a four-room apartment, we also sell our second house, and there are no more savings on the side, everything goes."

She raised the remaining 20 million shekels from 37 friends and family members who believed in her vision. The nights in the basement of the house yielded a brilliant business plan, and the captivating entrepreneur built a team of loyal managers around her based on the sharp perception that "no matter how talented you are, you cannot succeed alone."

She opposes affirmative action and believes solely in professionalism, sending a sharp message to other women: "Even if you meet a chauvinist who will annoy you, talk to him properly and he will fold within five minutes." With a company recording growth of tens of percent and record profits, Elishakov is already marking her next goal with full confidence and clarifying to everyone: "What is important is that by the age of 55 I will be worth two billion."