With the continuous rise in antibiotic resistance, novel methods that can reveal currently unknown antibiotic resistance mechanisms are essential to prepare and inform health responses and novel antibiotic discovery campaigns. Here, we built a library of species representative of the genus Mycobacterium and determined their antibiotic resistance profiles, allowing for the first time systematic multispecies comparisons. Analyzing antibiotic resistance in the context of other closely related yet diverse organisms revealed species with truly exceptional traits as well as general principles underpinning antibiotic resistance. Among these, we reveal that intrabacterial accumulation of antibiotics does not correlate with their potency at the species level. Our data also reveals that rifamycin resistance in mycobacteria is dominantly caused by antibiotic modification, contrary to what has been observed in Mycobacterium tuberculosis . Our data provides a solid starting point for the exploratio