For most people reading this site, the ultimate goal is not to be the richest doctor in the world. Maybe the goal is to pay off your student loans and go bankrupt again. Perhaps the goal is to maximize your retirement accounts. Perhaps the goal is to become financially independent or leave the workforce before most others, or to leave enough money to your heirs and/or your favorite charity.
But I can’t imagine anyone reading these words right now is hung up on the idea of having more money than everyone else with a medical degree (or a law degree or someone who is a pharmacist, dentist, APC, engineer, or pilot).
No. 1, it will never happen anyway. No. 2, it feels like it would be a real pain to even bother getting that much money into your bank accounts.
STILL, would it be cool to have a net worth of, say, $1.4 billion? Yes, probably.
So today let’s take a look at some of the doctors who rose to that level and see how they got there (and perhaps determine if there’s some kind of blueprint you can take if I was completely wrong in the opening paragraph and you actually Doing wants to be the richest doctor in the world). Please note: this is not a list of the five richest doctors; it’s more of a post about extremely wealthy doctors who have an interesting story.
The richest doctors in the world
Dr. Thomas Frist Jr.
With a net worth of approximately $34 billionFrist comes from a family of doctors. His father was a doctor. His brother, Bill Frist, served as a physician and majority leader in the U.S. Senate from 2003 to 2007. But Thomas Frist Jr. is richer than almost everyone after he and his father founded HCA Healthcare in 1968, which owns 190 hospitals and thousands of other health care facilities.
Thomas Frist Jr. was always an entrepreneur, according to his fatherand after completing his term as an Air Force flight surgeon, the younger Frist had an idea. He had been roommates with a son of one of the co-founders of the Holiday Inn franchise. One day Thomas approached Frist Jr. his father, who had already built several hospitals in Tennessee, and said:
“Dad, let’s start a chain of hospitals like Holiday Inn… Banks are together, gas stations are together, grocery stores are together. Why can’t we put hospitals together?”
It turned out to be a fairly successful venture. Economies of scale work for many other industries. Frist proved that it can also work for hospitals. He is apparently also an adept investor. In the mid-1960s, Frist invested $3,000 in KFC. Three years later the investment was made grown to $150,000.
Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong
Perhaps one of the most controversial people on this list (at least among journalists), Soon-Shiong made his $5.6 billion fortune by inventing the cancer drug Abraxane and then selling it, along with American Pharmaceutical Partners. a combined amount of $9.1 billion. The former transplant surgeon became involved in national politics in the mid-2010s, and as noted by STATSoon-Shiong has “promised to ‘fix healthcare’ once and for all – and, for good measure, to ‘win the war on cancer.’”
Soon-Shiong’s political contributions were largely left-leaning for most of his life, but he began aligning himself with President Trump during his first term, and after purchasing the Los Angeles Times in 2018, Soon-Shiong began to shift the paper much more to the right in terms of politics. He stopped the editors from endorsing a presidential candidate in 2024 (the LA Times would back Kamala Harris). Along the way, he infuriated many of his LA Times employees and drew backlash from the journalism world at large.
Now he wants to take the LA Times public.
As he said The Daily Show Jon Stewart last summer: “Growing up in South Africa, the only thing that inspired me and kept me alive was the newspaper. The opportunity for me, to work with cancer and hopefully cure cancer, was to have a place where the voice of the people, truly the voice of the people, could be heard.”
As a former newspaper reporter who’s glad he’s no longer in this industry, good luck to Soon-Shiong with all that.
Dr. Gary Michelson
Michelson, a retired orthopedic and spine surgeon, almost didn’t get the chance to graduate from medical school. As noted in his USC biography:
“During his third year in medical school, young Michelson refused to perform unnecessary surgeries to remove healthy organs from living dogs. While under threat of deportation, the orthopedic student devised an operation that allowed him to transplant a rib bone into the deformed leg of a 10-year-old girl, avoiding the need for amputation. He was allowed to remain in school.”
Since then, Michelson is now worth it $1.8 billionhas been granted nearly 1,000 U.S. patents for medical instruments, implants and surgical procedures. His drive to improve the success rates of spinal procedures has him, according to science.org“one of the most prolific inventors in medicine.”
Today, Michelson’s work is devoted to philanthropy.
‘People who know me have heard me say that life isn’t fair’ Michelson said. “And I’ve been given way too much. At some point you have to think about what you can do to make life a little less unfair for the people who aren’t so lucky. And I think that’s what we’re trying to do. If we leave the world better than we found it, then that’s the best we can do.”
Dr. James Andrews
Although he retired in 2024 at the age of 81, Andrews is perhaps the sports world’s most famous doctor ever. The orthopedic surgeon was THE primary care physician for injured athletes requiring consultation and surgery for ligament injuries in the 1980s, 1990s, and the first two decades of the 2000s. He operated on Michael Jordan, Jack Nicklaus, Hulk Hogan and Brett Favre.
Andrews was a college conference pole vault champion in the 1960s before becoming a surgeon in the decade that followed. As noted by MLB.com:
“His real break came in 1985, when a young pitcher named Roger Clemens was dealing with a shoulder injury and doubting the diagnosis he had received from the Red Sox. Clemens’ agent sent him to Andrews, who eventually performed the minimally invasive arthroscopic procedure that was just beginning to work.
Eight months later, Clemens struck out twenty batters in a game.
“That was really the beginning of the story of baseball players coming to Columbus, Georgia, and then to Birmingham,” Andrews says. “Roger and I were just damn lucky.”
As the Rocket’s star rose, so did Andrews’.
“I remember the confidence when this man walked into the room: he was a rock star.” [said former pitcher Al] Leiter. “The waters parted in every major league training room when he walked in.” You knew you were talking to and around greats.’
It is difficult to determine Andrews’ exact net worth, but several online sites speculate that it is (or was) around $100 million.
Dr. Mehmet Oz
On second thought: nevermind. We don’t have to go there anymore.
At WCI, we’ve written countless posts about how to get really rich, or you should attempt to get really rich, and what it’s like to do that are really very rich. Everyone mentioned above can elaborate on these topics. But to somehow become one of the richest doctors in the world, you would probably have to become an innovator, an investor or the owner of a newspaper. Ultimately, you have to ask yourself if all that work and risk is really worth it.
More information here:
10 Ways to Feel Rich
Choose to be rich
Money song of the week
If punk and hardcore music were really ‘punk’ you would never see any of those bands selling out their music to a fast food chain that would be played to a country hungry for cheap gordita crunches and ultimate chalupas. But ‘selling out’ is also a stupid construct that only serves to keep punk and other hard rock-like acts in the shadows, where they have to sleep on the floor or fight against ‘dirty bar owners’ and ‘politicians’ who take their meager income.
Sure, music is art, but I imagine in retrospect it’s only romantic to be a starving artist. As Lagwagon’s Joey Cape once sang, “The bands are good until they make enough money to eat/And get a pad/Then they sell out and the cliché of their music/Cause talent is exclusive to bands without pay.” And never forget what Tool’s Maynard James Keenan once shouted: “I sold out long before you ever heard my name.”
That brings us to one of the most successful punk/hardcore bands of the moment: Turnstile. Although formed in 2010, the band has only become popular in recent years, thanks to a few appearances on The Tonight Show and some large-scale marketing (including the very first stage dive ever on NPR’s Tiny Desk series). And Turnstile has made it all work. I saw the band last month at a sold-out venue of about 5,000 people, and the concert definitely felt like a punk show (it was a fairly short set full of endless energy from the five-piece band and lots of moshing and crowd surfing in the audience).
But it’s an interesting dynamic when a punk band (even one that isn’t in the dirty DIY mode that characterized punk in the 70s and 80s) is in bed with Taco Bell. It started in 2022 when Taco Bell presented the numbers Holiday (see below) and TLC (Turnstile Love Connection) in the chain Nacho Fries campaign.
Now that Turnstile has released a new album, it’s back in Taco Bell commercials with skateboarding legend Tony Hawk.
If this sells out, so be it. Getting paid by a major franchise might not be the most punk move a band can make. But if the money you make from those collaborations allows your band to continue touring and gain fame, then that’s better than playing small clubs to a few dozen people for little money for the rest of your existence.
More information here:
Every money song of the week ever published
YouTube shorts of the week
If you’ve ever wondered how beneficial it is to own a vending machine – including having to buy the inventory that goes into the vending machine, the time it takes to refill the vending machine, the risk of taking money out in the open and having to go to a bank to deposit all that money – here are a few lessons.
While it appears that vending machines can provide a positive ROI, you’re probably not going to make enough money to compete with Thomas Frist or Gary Michelson.
Would you ever want to compete for the title of richest doctor in the world? Would the juice be worth it? Why or why not?
[EDITOR’S NOTE: For comments, complaints, suggestions, or plaudits, email Josh Katzowitz at [email protected].]
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