Michael Milken

Michael Robert Milken (born July 4, 1946) is an American financier. He is known for his role in the development of the market for high-yield bonds ("junk bonds"), which led to his reputation as the "Junk Bond King", and his conviction and sentence following a guilty plea on felony charges for violating U.S. securities laws. Milken's compensation while head of the high-yield bond department at Drexel Burnham Lambert in the late 1980s exceeded $1 billion over a four-year period, a record for U.S. income at that time.

Milken was indicted for racketeering and securities fraud in 1989 in an insider trading investigation. In a plea bargain, he pleaded guilty to securities and reporting violations but not to racketeering or insider trading. Milken was sentenced to ten years in prison, fined $600 million (although his personal website claims $200 million), and permanently barred from the securities industry by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. His sentence was later reduced to two years for cooperating with testimony against his former colleagues and for good behavior. Milken was pardoned by President Donald Trump in February 2020.

Milken is a co-founder of the Milken Family Foundation, chairman of the Milken Institute, and founder of medical philanthropies funding research on melanoma, cancer, and other life-threatening diseases. A prostate cancer survivor, Milken has devoted significant resources to research on the disease.

Milken was born into a middle-class Jewish family in Encino, California. He graduated from Birmingham High School where he was the head cheerleader and worked at a diner while in school. His classmates included future Disney president Michael Ovitz and actresses Sally Field and Cindy Williams. In 1968, he graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, with a BS with highest honors. He was elected to Phi Beta Kappa and was a member of the Sigma Alpha Mu fraternity. He then received his MBA from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. While at Berkeley, Milken was influenced by credit studies authored by W. Braddock Hickman, a former president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland, who noted that a portfolio of non-investment grade bonds offered "risk-adjusted" returns greater than that of an investment-grade portfolio.

Through his Wharton professors, Milken landed a summer job at Drexel Harriman Ripley, an old-line investment bank, in 1969. After completing his MBA, he joined Drexel (by then known as Drexel Firestone) as director of low-grade bond research. He was also given control of some capital and permitted to trade. Over the next 17 years, he had only four down months.

Drexel merged with Burnham and Company in 1973 to form Drexel Burnham. Despite the firm's name, Burnham was effectively the sole survivor; the Drexel name came first only at the insistence of the more powerful investment banks, whose blessing was necessary for the merged firm to inherit Drexel's position as a "major" firm. Milken was one of the few prominent holdovers from the Drexel side of the merger, and he became the merged firm's head of convertibles. He persuaded his new boss, fellow Wharton alumnus Tubby Burnham, to let him start a high-yield bond trading department—an operation that soon earned a 100 percent return on investment. By 1976, Milken's income at the firm, which had become Drexel Burnham Lambert, was estimated at $5 million a year. In 1978, Milken moved the high-yield bond operation to Century City in Los Angeles.

By the mid-1980s, Milken's network of high-yield bond buyers (notably Fred Carr's Executive Life Insurance Company and Tom Spiegel's Columbia Savings & Loan) had reached a size that enabled him to raise large amounts of money quickly. This money-raising ability also facilitated the activities of leveraged buyout (LBO) firms such as Kohlberg Kravis Roberts and of the so-called "greenmailers". Most of them were armed with a "highly confident letter" from Drexel, a tool Drexel's corporate finance wing crafted that promised to raise the necessary debt in time to fulfill the buyer's obligations. It carried no legal status, but by that time Milken had a reputation for being able to make markets for any bonds that he underwrote. For this reason, "highly confident letters" were considered to reliably demonstrate capacity to pay.

Supporters, like George Gilder in his book Telecosm (2000), state that Milken was "a key source of the organizational changes that have impelled economic growth over the last twenty years. Most striking was the productivity surge in capital, as Milken ... and others took the vast sums trapped in old-line businesses and put them back into the markets." Despite his influence in the financial world during the 1980s, (at least one source called him the most powerful American financier since J. P. Morgan), Milken is an intensely private man who shuns publicity; he reportedly owned almost all photographs taken of him.

Milken and his brother Lowell founded Knowledge Universe in 1996, as well as Knowledge Learning Corporation (KLC), the parent company of KinderCare Learning Centers, the largest for-profit child care provider in the country. Michael Milken was chairman of Knowledge Universe until it was sold in 2015. He invested in K12 Inc., a publicly traded education management organization (EMO) that provides online schooling, including to charter school students, for whom services are paid by tax dollars, which is the largest EMO in terms of enrollment.

According to Forbes, Milken has given away between 5–10% of his fortune, earning a philanthropy score of 3 out of 5. Upon his release from prison in 1993, Milken founded the Prostate Cancer Foundation for prostate cancer research, which by 2010 was "the largest philanthropic source of funds for research into prostate cancer". Milken himself was diagnosed with advanced prostate cancer in the same month he was released.

His cancer is in remission. The Prostate Cancer Foundation works closely with Major League Baseball through its Home Run Challenge program to promote awareness of prostate cancer and raise money for medical research. Each season in the weeks leading up to Father's Day, Milken visits many ballparks and appears on TV and radio broadcasts during the games. In 2003, Milken launched a Washington, D.C.–based think tank called FasterCures, which seeks greater efficiency in researching all serious diseases. Initiatives of FasterCures include TRAIN, Partnering for Cures, and the Philanthropy Advisory Service.

In March 2014, President Steven Knapp of George Washington University in Washington, D.C. announced the university was renaming its public health school after Milken as a result of a total of $80 million in gifts, $50 million from the Milken Institute and the Milken Family Foundation and $30 million gift from Viacom chairman Sumner Redstone. The gifts were designated for research and scholarship on public health issues. In September 2025, Milken officially opened the Milken Center for Advancing the American Dream (MCAAD) next to the White House in Washington, D.C., an interactive museum that features artists, entrepreneurs, and innovators in health and education. MCAAD also highlights the American financial system.

Milken became the first recipient of the Ig Nobel Economics Prize in 1991. He is also a character in the 1991 film Pizza Man, where he is portrayed by actor Jim Jackman. Milken is referenced by Chris Stevens in the 1994 Northern Exposure episode "The Robe" (season 6, episode 5) at 31:29: "Trust and honesty. The age-old quest of Diogenes in a post-Milken universe." He is referenced by Hank Scorpio in the 1996 The Simpsons episode "You Only Move Twice". Milken is referenced in the 2002 Futurama episode "Future Stock". Ayad Akhtar's 2016 play Junk, set during the bond trading scandals of the 1980s, is partly based on Milken's "fall from grace". Milken is the inspiration for the main character in the play.

Milken is married to Lori Anne Hackel, whom he had dated in high school. The couple has three children. He reportedly follows a vegetarian-like diet rich in fruits and vegetables, and has co-authored two vegan cookbooks with Beth Ginsberg.