Phillip Frost

Phillip Frost was born in Philadelphia in 1936 and trained as a physician. He was a working dermatologist before he was a pharmaceutical billionaire, and the medical lens never quite left the business. He bought into a small drug company in the early 1970s and renamed it Key Pharmaceuticals. The product that defined Key was Nicoderm — the nicotine patch — a household-name innovation in smoking cessation. Schering-Plough acquired Key Pharmaceuticals in 1986 for roughly $835 million.

The second act was IVAX Corporation, which Frost built into a global generics powerhouse with manufacturing across multiple continents. In 2006 Teva Pharmaceuticals — already the largest generic-drug company in the world — acquired IVAX in a deal valued at roughly $7.4 billion, instantly making Frost one of Miami's most prominent operating billionaires.

The third act is OPKO Health (NASDAQ: OPK), where Frost has served as chairman and CEO since around 2007. OPKO is a diagnostics-and-pharma hybrid, and Frost is by far its largest holder. The unusual part is the insider-buying record: Frost has filed SEC Form 4 reports on OPKO at a cadence almost no other sitting public-company CEO matches. He is, by the public record, one of the most consistent insider buyers on EDGAR.

Off the balance sheet, the Frost name is on a Miami science museum, a University of Miami music school, an FIU art museum, and a building at Albert Einstein College of Medicine. Patricia and Phillip Frost's art collecting is serious-collector serious. The Miami Beach billionaire archetype that everyone else is doing impressions of — Frost is an early original.