By Josh Katzowitz, WCI Content DirectorFor most of the 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 get back to broke. Maybe the goal is to start maxing out your retirement accounts. Maybe the goal is to get financially independent or to get out of the workforce earlier than most others or to leave plenty of money to your heirs and/or your favorite charity.
But I can’t imagine anybody reading these words right now is stuck on the idea of having more money than everybody else who has a medical degree (or a law degree or somebody who is a pharmacist, a dentist, an APC, an engineer, or a pilot).
No. 1, it’s never going to happen anyway. No. 2, it feels like it’d be a real pain in the tush to even bother trying to get that much money in your bank accounts.
STILL, would it be cool to have a net worth of, say, $1.4 billion? Yeah, it probably would.
Today, then, let’s take a look at some of the doctors who have ascended to that level and see how they got there (and maybe determine if there’s some kind of blueprint for you to take if I was completely wrong in the opening paragraph and you actually do want to be the richest doctor in the world). Note: this isn’t a list of the five richest doctors; it’s more of a post about immensely rich doctors who have an interesting story.
The Richest Doctors in the World
Dr. Thomas Frist Jr.
With a net worth of about $34 billion, Frist comes from a family of doctors. His dad was a doctor. His brother, Bill Frist, was a doctor and the US Senate majority leader from 2003-07. But Thomas Frist Jr. is wealthier than just about everybody after he and his dad founded HCA Healthcare, which owns 190 hospitals and thousands of other healthcare sites, in 1968.
Thomas Frist Jr. was always an entrepreneur, according to his father, and after completing his tenure 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 Frist Jr. approached his father, who had already built multiple hospitals in Tennessee, and said,
“Daddy, let’s start a chain of hospitals like Holiday Inn . . . Banks are together, filling stations are together, grocery stores are together. Why can’t we put hospitals together?”
It turned out to be a rather successful enterprise. Economies of scale work for plenty of other industries. Frist proved it can work for hospitals as well. He’s also apparently an adept investor. In the mid-1960s, Frist invested $3,000 in KFC. Three years later, that investment had 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 fortune of $5.6 billion by inventing the cancer drug Abraxane and then selling it, along with American Pharmaceutical Partners, for a combined $9.1 billion. The former transplant surgeon got involved in national politics in the mid-2010s, and as noted by STAT, Soon-Shiong has “promised to ‘solve health care’ once and for all—and, for good measure, to ‘win the war on cancer.’”
Soon-Shiong’s political contributions were mostly left-leaning for most of his life, but he began affiliating himself with President Trump during his first term, and after buying the Los Angeles Times in 2018, Soon-Shiong began shifting the newspaper much more to the right in terms of politics. He stopped the editorial board from endorsing a presidential candidate in 2024 (the LA Times was set to endorse Kamala Harris). Along the way, he infuriated many of his LA Times employees and drew plenty of retorts from the journalism world at large.
Now, he wants to take the LA Times public.
As he told The Daily Show’s Jon Stewart last summer, “As I grew up in South Africa, the only thing that inspired me, that kept me alive, was the newspaper. The opportunity for me, working with cancer, hopefully curing 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 is happy to not be in that business anymore, good luck to Soon-Shiong with all of that.
Dr. Gary Michelson
Michelson, a retired orthopedic and spinal 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, the young Michelson refused to perform unnecessary operations to remove healthy organs from living dogs. While under the threat of expulsion, the orthopedic student invented a surgery through which he was able to transplant a rib bone into a 10-year-old girl’s deformed leg, averting the need to amputate. He was allowed to remain in school.”
Since then, Michelson, now worth $1.8 billion, has been awarded nearly 1,000 US patents for medical instruments, implants, and surgical procedures. His drive to improve the success rates of spinal procedures has made him, according to science.org, “one of the most prolific inventors in medicine.”
These days, Michelson’s work is dedicated to philanthropy.
“People who know me have heard me say that life is not fair,” Michelson said. “And I have gotten way too much. At some point, you have to think about what you can do to make life a little bit less unfair for the people who are not so fortunate. And I think that’s what we are trying to do. If we leave the world better than we found it, then that’s as good as it gets.”
Dr. James Andrews
Though he retired in 2024 at the age of 81, Andrews is perhaps the most famous physician ever in the sports world. The orthopedic surgeon was THE go-to doctor for injured athletes who needed consultation and surgery on 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 champion pole vaulter in the 1960s before becoming a surgeon in the decade that followed. As noted by MLB.com:
“His real breakthrough came in 1985, when a young pitcher named Roger Clemens was dealing with a shoulder injury and questioning the diagnosis he had received from the Red Sox. Clemens’ agent sent him to see Andrews, who wound up performing the minimally invasive arthroscopic procedure that was just beginning to catch on.
Eight months later, Clemens struck out 20 batters in a game.
‘That really kicked off the story of baseball players coming down to Columbus, Ga., and then to Birmingham,’ Andrews says. ‘Roger and I were just damn lucky.’”
As the Rocket’s star rose, so, too, did that of Andrews.
‘I remember the confidence of when this man walked into the room, he was a rock star,’ [said former pitcher Al] Leiter. ‘Every single Major League training room, the waters were parted when he walked in. You knew you were talking to and around greatness.’”
It’s hard to pinpoint Andrews’ exact net worth, but various online sites speculate that it is (or was) about $100 million.
Dr. Mehmet Oz
On second thought, never mind. We don’t need to go there again.
At WCI, we’ve written numerous posts about how to get really rich, whether you should try to get really rich, and what it’s like to be really, really rich. Everybody mentioned above could weigh in on those topics. But to somehow get to be one of the richest doctors in the world would probably take you becoming either an innovator, an investor, or the owner of a newspaper. In the end, you have to question whether all of that work and risk is really worth it.
More information here:
Money Song of the Week
If punk and hardcore music were truly “punk,” you’d never see any of those bands sell out their music to a fast food chain that would be played to a nation that's hungry for cheesy gordita crunches and supreme chalupas. But also “selling out” is a dumb construct that only serves to keep punk and other hard rock type acts in the shadows, where they have to sleep on floors or fight against “dirty bar owners” and “politicians” taking away their meager earnings.
Sure, music is art, but I imagine being a starving artist is only romantic in retrospect. As Lagwagon’s Joey Cape once sang, “The bands are good 'til they make enough cash to eat food/And get a pad/Then they sold out and their music's cliché/Because talent's exclusive to bands without pay.” And never forget what Tool’s Maynard James Keenan once howled, “I sold out long before you ever heard my name.”
Which brings us to one of the most successful punk/hardcore bands on the scene today, Turnstile. Though it formed in 2010, the band has only gotten popular in the last few years, thanks to a couple of appearances on The Tonight Show and some large-scale marketing (including the first-ever stage dive at NPR’s Tiny Desk series). And Turnstile has made it all work. I saw the band last month at a sold-out venue that holds about 5,000 people, and the concert certainly felt like a punk show (it was a rather short set that was filled with never-ending energy from the five-piece band and plenty of moshing and crowd-surfing in the audience).
But it’s an interesting dynamic when a punk band (even one that’s not in the dirty DIY mode that was a hallmark of punk in the 1970s and '80s) is in bed with Taco Bell. It started in 2022 when Taco Bell featured the songs Holiday (seen below) and T.L.C. (Turnstile Love Connection) in the chain’s Nacho Fries campaign.
Now that Turnstile has released a new album, it’s back in Taco Bell commercials featuring skateboarding legend Tony Hawk.
If this is selling out, then so be it. Getting paid by a major franchise might not be the most punk move a band can make. But if the money earned from those collaborations allows your band to continue to tour and get notoriety, well, it beats playing tiny clubs in front of a few dozen people for little pay for the rest of your existence.
More information here:
Every Money Song of the Week Ever Published
YouTube Shorts of the Week
In case you ever wondered about the economics of owning a vending machine—which includes having to buy the inventory that goes inside the machine, the time it takes to restock it, the risk of carrying money out in the open, and having to go to a bank to deposit all that cash—here are a few lessons.
While it appears that vending machines might return a positive ROI, you’re probably not going to make enough money to rival 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 the squeeze? Why or why not?
[EDITOR'S NOTE: For comments, complaints, suggestions, or plaudits, email Josh Katzowitz at [email protected].]
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