American Dentists Generate More Revenue Than the NFL, NBA and MLB Combined

On the September 18, 2026 episode of Bloomberg’s Odd Lots, “There’s a Mind-Boggling Number of Rich People in America,” the two economists behind the new book The Everywhere Millionaire offered a comparison that stops the podcast cold. “If you add up all the revenue of dentists in America, it exceeds the revenue generated by the NFL, the NBA, MLB, Formula. Basically all professional sports and dentists are earning more.” The line comes from Eric Zwick, professor of economics and finance at Chicago Booth, and his co-author, a professor of economics at Princeton, whose book catalogs where American fortunes are actually built.

What the Comparison Actually Measures

This is an industry-versus-industry figure. The authors are stacking the aggregate revenue of every dental practice in the United States against the combined revenue of the country’s major professional sports leagues. No single dentist is out-earning a franchise. The claim is that the dental sector, added up practice by practice across all fifty states, generates more top-line revenue than the NFL, the NBA, MLB, and essentially all professional sports combined. The authors do not attach a dollar figure to either side of the comparison in the episode, and neither will we.

The ranking gives the scale a second anchor. Zwick notes that dentists are “number 21 on our list of top pass through four digit industries by profit.” Pass-through industries are the ones where profit flows to owners’ personal returns rather than to a public corporation’s shareholders, and they are where The Everywhere Millionaire locates most of the country’s actual wealth creation. Dentistry sitting inside the top two dozen of that ranking is the point. It is not a niche.

How a Dentist Actually Gets Rich

The thesis of the book, and the reason dentistry shows up so often in it, is that wealth in these professions comes from ownership. Zwick draws the line cleanly. “If you’re just a normal dentist, you have a pretty good life. But if you own, you know, a few offices, you can have a great life.” He goes further on the upper end: “if you own eight dental practices, you can be quite really rich.”

That is the distinction readers keep missing when this statistic gets passed around. A practicing dentist earns a professional’s income. An owner-operator of a small chain of practices is running a services business with staff, equipment financing, insurance contracting, and recurring demand, and captures the profit from every chair in every location. The joke Zwick tells on the episode gets at the demand side. “Everybody’s got teeth and so if you own several of these, this is great.” The economic engine is the multiplication.

Why This Matters Outside the Chair

Scale of that size buys political footprint, and the episode is direct about it. Zwick observes that dentists are in every congressional district, which makes them one of the most evenly distributed high-earning professional lobbies in the country. He gives a concrete example of what that footprint gets used for. “When you know, you think about things like oh let’s include dental services and Medicare for example, they lobby against that to be like well we don’t want price pressure from the government.”

For any reader outside the wealth tier this book describes, that is the practical takeaway. A profession large enough to out-revenue professional sports also has the organizational weight to shape whether tens of millions of older Americans get dental coverage under a federal program. Zwick notes the same regulatory leverage is really the case more for doctors too. When investors, voters, or policymakers look for where fragmented ownership quietly aggregates into national power, the dentist’s office is a better map than the stock ticker.

The comparison is memorable because it inverts the cultural assumption that pro sports is where the big money lives. In the authors’ data, the big money in America is stitched together out of thousands of owner-operated services businesses in every district. Dentistry just happens to be the cleanest example. The lesson is where to look next.

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