In the year to March 2026, Forbes estimated that her net worth increased by about $33 billion, taking it to almost $120 billion. Walton, now 76, is not a Walmart executive or board member. For Alice Walton, much of the attention around her wealth comes from an asset she did not build herself. The youngest child of Walmart founder Sam Walton has remained a major shareholder in the retail giant, even as her own career moved away from the company. Her fortune has continued to rise with the value of the family’s Walmart holdings. Her public work in recent years has instead centred on art, philanthropy and a growing interest in medicine.
In 2021, she established the Alice L. She committed $250 million to the medical school, which offers a four-year degree programme. Its first students arrived in 2025, with an inaugural class of 48. On September 17, the Alice L. The foundation is committing $350 million towards a planned 250-bed hospital and cancer centre, according to Fortune. The first building is a specialty care centre focused on cardiac services, with an opening scheduled for 2029. In 2024, educator Ruth Gottesman donated $1 billion to Albert Einstein College of Medicine, allowing the institution to make tuition free for its students. Michael Bloomberg’s philanthropy also committed $1 billion to Johns Hopkins University to help cover medical student tuition.
Because conventional healthcare payment structures do not always reward the time spent discussing them with patients, walton has spoken about nutrition and exercise as areas she believes doctors need more preparation in, particularly. For Walton, medicine has therefore become more than a charitable funding area.
The school has said that tuition will be waived for its first five cohorts, although students remain responsible for expenses such as fees and living costs. Her comments to PBS NewsHour, “The real problem with health care is that there’s no incentive in the payment system for doctors to spend time helping you learn what good nutrition is, how important exercise is”. Walton’s work outside Walmart has increasingly moved towards medicine. Walton School of Medicine in Bentonville, Arkansas, the city where she grew up and where Walmart is headquartered. The medical school is part of a broader interest Walton has developed in connecting medicine with the arts. She has described the combination as a deliberate part of the school’s identity rather than treating medical education as a purely scientific exercise. The medical school is not the only healthcare project associated with Walton’s foundation. Walton Foundation joined Mercy and Cleveland Clinic for the groundbreaking of a new health campus in Bentonville. The project is intended to bring hospital care, specialist services, research and technology together in northwest Arkansas. Walton has also linked the development to improving healthcare access for rural communities in Arkansas and the surrounding region. The decision to waive tuition for the first groups of students at Walton’s medical school comes amid several large philanthropic commitments to medical education in the United States. Those donations were directed towards medical schools that were already operating. Walton’s approach has been different in that her money helped establish a new institution as well as supporting its early students. It now includes an educational institution, a developing healthcare campus and a stated interest in changing how future doctors are trained.