Los Angeles' richest man is South African-born doctor with a $16.6 billion fortune

Patrick Soon-Shiong, the South African-born physician, biotechnology entrepreneur and owner of the Los Angeles Times, is the richest person in Los Angeles with a net worth of $16.6 billion according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index and Forbes, cementing his status as one of the most consequential South African-born wealth stories in global business.

Soon-Shiong was born July 29, 1952, in Port Elizabeth, South Africa, the son of Chinese immigrants who had moved to the country from Guangdong Province. He studied medicine at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, earning his MBBCh and MD before completing a fellowship in surgery at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, where he also earned a master's degree in science. He arrived in Los Angeles in the 1980s to join the faculty at UCLA Medical Center as a transplant surgeon, and has remained in the city ever since.

His wealth was built through one of the more remarkable drug development stories in recent American biotech history. In the 1990s, Soon-Shiong developed Abraxane, a formulation of paclitaxel — a chemotherapy agent — bound to albumin nanoparticles, which made the drug more effective and reduced some of its most severe side effects. The drug received FDA approval for breast cancer treatment in 2005 and subsequently gained approval for non-small cell lung cancer and pancreatic cancer. In 2010, he sold his pharmaceutical company Abraxis BioScience, which held the Abraxane franchise, to Celgene Corporation for $2.9 billion in cash and stock, the foundational transaction that transformed him from a successful surgeon-entrepreneur into a billionaire.

He has continued building in the years since. Through his holding company NantWorks LLC, Soon-Shiong has assembled a portfolio spanning cancer immunotherapy, artificial intelligence in healthcare, digital health infrastructure and media. His most recent significant FDA approval came in 2024 for Anktiva, a new class of immunotherapy drug for non-muscle invasive bladder cancer, developed through ImmunityBio, his Nasdaq-listed biotechnology company.

ImmunityBio is the primary public vehicle for his cancer research ambitions. The company is developing a broad pipeline of immunotherapy drugs targeting multiple cancer types, based on a scientific thesis that the immune system can be retrained to identify and destroy cancer cells without the systemic toxicity of conventional chemotherapy. Soon-Shiong has described this work as a potential turning point in the history of cancer treatment.

His media interests are anchored by his ownership of the Los Angeles Times, which he acquired in 2018 for $500 million from Tribune Publishing, ending a period of uncertainty about the future of one of the oldest and largest newspapers in the United States. The LA Times has been through significant editorial turbulence under his ownership, navigating multiple rounds of layoffs and a high-profile standoff with its newsroom union, but remains one of the most widely read newspapers on the US West Coast.

Soon-Shiong also holds a minority stake in the Los Angeles Lakers, the NBA franchise he invested in in 2010 as part of a group that includes the Buss family. His ownership of both the city's flagship newspaper and a position in its most famous sports franchise gives him an unusual position in the cultural life of Los Angeles that goes beyond his financial standing.

His connection to South Africa has remained a thread through his career. He was born into the apartheid era, educated in its segregated university system, and departed for Canada and then the United States before the country's democratic transition. His South African origins rarely feature prominently in how American media covers him, but they place him squarely within a tradition of South African-born individuals who have built some of the most significant technology and innovation fortunes in the world — a tradition that now runs from Soon-Shiong himself through Elon Musk, Mark Shuttleworth, Ivan Glasenberg and Koos Bekker among others.

At $16.6 billion, Soon-Shiong's net worth makes him the wealthiest South African-born individual resident in the United States by a significant margin, and one of a small number of South African-born billionaires whose fortunes were built entirely outside the continent.