Michael Milken

Milken was indicted for racketeering and securities fraud in 1989 in an insider trading investigation. As the result of 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 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 on February 18, 2020.

On February 18, 2020, Trump granted a full pardon to Milken. However, his previous trading license which he lost following his conviction still remained void, and he would still have to reapply and obtain a new trading license in order to return to trading securities.

In June 2018, it was reported that some of president Donald Trump's supporters and friends, including Kevin McCarthy, Rupert Murdoch, Sheldon Adelson, Elaine Chao, and Rudy Giuliani, the onetime federal prosecutor whose criminal investigation led to Milken's conviction, were urging the president to pardon Milken. Milken's attempts to secure a presidential pardon spanned multiple administrations.

Amongst his significant detractors have been Martin Fridson formerly of Merrill Lynch and author Ben Stein. Milken's high-yield "pioneer" status has proved dubious as studies show "original issue" high-yield issues were common during and after the Great Depression. Milken himself points out that high-yield bonds go back hundreds of years, having been issued by the Massachusetts Bay Colony in the 17th century and by America's first Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton. Others such as Stanford Phelps, an early co-associate and rival at Drexel, have also contested his credit for having pioneered the modern high-yield market.

On March 11, 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. These gifts are designated to research and scholarship on public health issues.

In February 2013, the SEC announced that they were investigating whether Milken violated his lifetime ban from the securities industry. The investigation revolved around Milken allegedly providing investment advice through Guggenheim Partners.

Since 2011, the SEC has been investigating Guggenheim's relationship with Milken.

In 2003, Milken launched a Washington, D.C.-based think tank called FasterCures, which seeks greater efficiency in researching all serious diseases. Key initiatives of FasterCures are TRAIN, Partnering for Cures and the Philanthropy Advisory Service.

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 this 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."

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.

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 currently 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 statements to a parole board in 1991, Judge Wood estimated that the "total loss from Milken's crimes" was $318,000, less than the government's estimate of $4.7 million and she recommended that he be eligible for parole in three years. Milken's sentence was later reduced to two years from ten; he served 22 months.

Milken became the first recipient of the Ig Nobel Economics Prize in 1991.

On April 24, 1990, Milken pleaded guilty to six counts of securities and tax violations. Three of them involved dealings with Boesky to conceal the real owner of a stock:

Critics of the government charge that the government indicted Milken's brother Lowell to pressure Milken to settle, a tactic some legal scholars condemn as unethical. "I am troubled by - and other scholars are troubled by - the notion of putting relatives on the bargaining table," said Vivian Berger, a professor at Columbia University Law School, in a 1990 interview with The New York Times. As part of the deal, the case against Lowell was dropped. Federal investigators also questioned some of Milken's relatives about their investments.

In March 1989, a federal grand jury indicted Milken on 98 counts of racketeering and fraud. The indictment accused Milken of a litany of misconduct, including insider trading, stock parking (concealing the real owner of a stock), tax evasion and numerous instances of repayment of illicit profits. One charge was that Boesky paid Drexel $5.3 million in 1986 for Milken's share of profits from illegal trading. This payment was represented as a consulting fee to Drexel. Shortly afterward, Milken resigned from Drexel and formed his own firm, International Capital Access Group.

For two years, Drexel insisted that nothing illegal occurred, even when the SEC sued Drexel in 1988. Later that year, Giuliani began considering an indictment of Drexel under the powerful Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act. Drexel management immediately began plea bargain talks, concluding that a financial institution could not possibly survive a RICO indictment. However, talks collapsed on December 19, when Giuliani made several demands that Drexel found too harsh, including one that Milken leave the firm if indicted.

Indeed, several money managers were eventually convicted on bribery charges. The discovery of MacPherson Partners—whose very existence had not been known to the public at the time—seriously eroded Milken's credibility with the board. On December 21, 1988, Drexel entered a guilty plea to six counts of stock parking and stock manipulation. Drexel said it "was not in a position to dispute" the allegations made by the government. As part of the deal, Drexel agreed that Milken had to leave the firm if indicted.

The SEC inquiries never got beyond the investigation phase until 1986, when arbitrageur Ivan Boesky pleaded guilty to securities fraud as part of a larger insider trading investigation. As part of his plea, Boesky implicated Milken in several illegal transactions, including insider trading, stock manipulation, fraud and stock parking (buying stocks for the benefit of another). This led to an SEC probe of Drexel, as well as a separate criminal probe by Rudy Giuliani, then United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York. Although both investigations were almost entirely focused on Milken's department, Milken refused to talk with Drexel (which launched its own internal investigation) except through his lawyers. It turned out that Milken's legal team believed Drexel would be forced to cooperate with the government at some point, believing that a securities firm would not survive the bad publicity of a long criminal and SEC probe.

Only a day later, however, Drexel lawyers discovered suspicious activity in one of the limited partnerships Milken set up to allow members of his department to make their own investments. That entity, MacPherson Partners, had acquired several warrants for the stock of Storer Broadcasting in 1985. At the time, Kohlberg Kravis Roberts was in the midst of a leveraged buyout of Storer, and Drexel was lead underwriter for the bonds being issued. One of Drexel's other clients bought several Storer warrants and sold them back to the high-yield bond department. The department in turn sold them to MacPherson. This partnership included Milken, other Drexel executives, and a few Drexel customers. However, it also included several managers of money market funds who had worked with Milken in the past. It appeared that the money managers bought the warrants for themselves and did not offer the same opportunity to the funds they managed. Some of Milken's children also received warrants, according to Stewart, raising the appearance of Milken self-dealing.

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.

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.

Ayad Akhtar's 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.

Dan Stone, a former Drexel executive, wrote in his book April Fools that Milken was under nearly constant scrutiny from the Securities and Exchange Commission from 1979 onward due to unethical and sometimes illegal behavior in the high-yield department.

Milken was one of the few prominent holdovers from the Drexel side of the merger, and 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.

Drexel merged with Burnham and Company in 1973 to form Drexel Burnham. Despite the firm's name, Burnham was the nominal 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.

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.

He graduated from Birmingham High School where he was the head cheerleader and worked while in school at a diner. 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 B.S. with highest honors. He was elected to Phi Beta Kappa and was a member of the Sigma Alpha Mu fraternity. He 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.

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"), 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. With a net worth of $6 billion as of 2022, he is ranked by Forbes magazine as the 412th richest person in the world.