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Michael Robert Milken (born July 4, 1946) is an American financier. He is known for his role in the development of the market for ("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. With a net worth of 6 billion as of 2022, he is among the richest people in the world.
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 on February 18, 2020.
Milken is a co-founder of the Milken Family Foundation, chairman of the Milken Institute, and founder of medical philanthropies funding research into melanoma, cancer, and other life-threatening diseases. A prostate cancer survivor, Milken has devoted significant resources to research on the disease.
He graduated from Birmingham High School where he was the head cheerleader and worked while in school at a diner.Edward Jay Epstein MANHATTAN, INC: "The Secret World of Mike Milken" , September 1987. 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 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.
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.
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.
This money-raising ability also facilitated the activities of leveraged buyout (LBO) firms such as Kohlberg Kravis Roberts and of the so-called "". 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.
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.
Milken's role in such behavior has been much debated. Stone claims that Milken viewed the securities laws, rules, and regulations with a degree of contempt, feeling they hindered the free flow of trade. However, Stone said that while Milken condoned questionable and illegal acts by his colleagues, Milken himself personally followed the rules. Milken often contacted Fred Joseph, Drexel's president and CEO, with ethical questions; Joseph was known for his strict view of the securities laws.
On the other hand, several of the sources James B. Stewart used for Den of Thieves told him that Milken often tried to get as much as five times the maximum markup on trades that was permitted at the time.
Harvey A. Silverglate, a defense attorney who represented Milken during the appellate process, disputes that view in his book Three Felonies a Day: "Milken's biggest problem was that some of his most ingenious but entirely lawful maneuvers were viewed, by those who initially did not understand them, as felonious, precisely because they were novel – and often extremely profitable."
For two years, Drexel insisted that nothing illegal had 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 (RICO) Act. Drexel management, concluding that a financial institution could not possibly survive a RICO indictment, immediately began plea bargain talks. However, talks collapsed on December 19, when Giuliani made several demands that went beyond even what those who believed an indictment would destroy the firm were willing to accept. For example, Giuliani demanded that Milken leave the firm if indicted.
Only a day later, 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 Underwriting 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. It also included several managers of money market funds who had worked with Milken in the past. It appeared that the 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.
The warrants to money managers were especially problematic. At the very least, Milken's actions were a serious breach of Drexel's internal regulations, and the money managers had breached their fiduciary duty to their clients. At worst, the warrants could have been construed as bribery to the money managers, to influence decisions they made for their funds.
Indeed, several money managers were eventually convicted on bribery charges. The discovery of MacPherson Partners—whose 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 an Alford plea to six counts of stock parking and stock manipulation. It allowed Drexel to maintain its innocence while conceding that 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.
/ref> The indictment included a long list of misconduct, including insider trading, tax evasion, stock manipulation, tax fraud, stock parking (concealing "Drexel's ownership of 6f securities by causing the securities to be secretly purchased or sold through affiliates of Ivan Boesky or Princeton/Newport for the purpose of gaining secret and unlawful advantages and profits in corporate takeover contests"), and other crimes. United States of America, v. Ivan F. Boesky, Defendant. No. 87 Cr. 378(MEL). United States District Court, S.D. New York. December 16, 1987. see footnote 11, citing United States v. Milken, No. 89 Cr. 41 (KBW) (S.D.N.Y. 1989). 7. 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.
Milken's protege Terren Peizer had worked as a junk bond salesman for Milken, managing an account with which Drexel had an illegal arrangement that included insider trading and phony tax losses. Peizer provided material evidence to prosecutors against Milken. "DEFENDANT' SUPPLEMENTAL MEMORANDUM OF LAW IN SUPPORT OF MOTION FOR REDUCTION OF SENTENCE Pursuant to Rule 35(b)", US v. Boesky, United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, April 13, 1989. At Milken's pre-sentencing hearing for securities fraud in 1990, Peizer testified against Milken in exchange for Legal immunity from both criminal prosecution and SEC sanctions.David A. Vise (September 12, 1989). "New Charges against Milken Expected", The Washington Post.
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:
Two other counts were related to tax evasion in transactions Milken carried out for a client of the firm, David Solomon, a fund manager:
The last count was for conspiracy to commit these five violations.
As part of his plea, Milken agreed to pay $200 million in fines. At the same time, he agreed to a settlement with the SEC in which he paid $400 million to investors who had been hurt by his actions. He also accepted a lifetime ban from any involvement in the securities industry. In a related civil lawsuit against Drexel, he agreed to pay $500 million to Drexel's investors.
Critics of the government charge that the government indicted Milken's brother Lowell Milken 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.
At Milken's sentencing, Judge Kimba Wood told him:
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.Al Gini & Alexei M. Marcoux Case Studies in Business Ethics ; accessed April 24, 2018. "Stars of the junkyard - Twenty years after Michael Milken's junk-bond firm came crashing down, the financial revolution that it fostered lives on" , economist.com, October 21, 2010.
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 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.
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. The gifts were designated for research and scholarship on public health issues.
Ayad Akhtar 2016 play , 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 referenced by Hank Scorpio in The Simpsons episode “You Only Move Twice”.
Milken is referenced by Chris Stevens in Northern Exposure Season 6, Ep. 5 – The Robe (31:29). “Trust and honesty. The age-old quest of Diogenes in a post-Milken universe.”
Milken is referenced in the Futurama episode "Future Stock".
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