Four of the 15 healthcare-industry billionaires on Forbes’ 2026 Forbes 400 list are physicians, and the rest built their fortunes as executives, founders or heirs in hospitals, medical devices, drug distribution and pharma.
Here are the physicians who made the cut, ranked by net worth.
1. Thomas Frist Jr., MD: $33.6 billion
Rank: 32
A former U.S. Air Force flight surgeon, Dr. Frist co-founded HCA Healthcare with his father, Thomas Frist Sr., MD, in 1968. HCA Healthcare is now the largest for-profit hospital operator in the U.S.
2. Patrick Soon-Shiong, MD: $10.3 billion
Rank: 151
Dr. Soon-Shiong, a board-certified transplant surgeon, performed UCLA’s first whole-pancreas transplant and pioneered an encapsulated islet-cell transplant technique before leaving academic medicine to build biotech companies. He sold Abraxis BioScience and American Pharmaceutical Partners for a combined $9.1 billion and now leads ImmunityBio and NantWorks.
3. Keith Dunleavy, MD, & family: $4.6 billion
Rank: 375
Dr. Dunleavy completed an internal medicine residency at Johns Hopkins after earning his medical degree from Harvard. He conceived the idea for Inovalon, a healthcare data analytics company, during that residency and became its CEO in 1998.
4. August Troendle, MD: $4.4 billion
Rank: 396
Dr. Troendle earned his medical degree from the University of Maryland School of Medicine. He worked on cholesterol-drug development at Sandoz and served as a medical review officer in the FDA’s Division of Metabolic and Endocrine Drug Products before founding Medpace, a clinical research organization, in 1992. He remains the company’s president and CEO.
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