Michael Milken

Leader Leader Leader

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• http://www.mikemilken.com/

Overview

Mike Milken's career has mirrored his four main professional passions: medical research, public health, education reform and expansion of access to financial capital. In each, he has been uniquely successful in creating value, whether measured in lives saved (Fortune magazine called him "The Man Who Changed Medicine"), students inspired or jobs created. Between 1969 and 1989, he financed more than 3,200 companies that collectively created millions of jobs. His philanthropy, which began in the 1970s and paralleled his business career, expanded in 1982 with the establishment of the Milken Family Foundation. He also heads the Prostate Cancer Foundation and FasterCures, a Washington-based think tank that removes barriers to progress against all life-threatening diseases. As a financier, Milken is often said to have revolutionized modern capital markets, making them more efficient, dynamic and democratic by expanding access to capital for thousands of smaller companies. This financed much of the early growth of cable television, homebuilding, cellular phones and other industries. In a 2004 speech, Sir Harold Evans, author of the book, They Made America, said, "Michael Milken is a formidable innovator and we'll all be in his debt for a long time." In The New York Times, author Charles Morris wrote that Milken "helped blow away a corporate old boy network that had proved unable to cope with competitive challenges from Asia and Europe." Without this, wrote Morris, "it is hard to imagine how America could have become the lean, mean, competitive machine that dominated the industrial world of the 1990s." A Washington Post column said Milken "helped create the conditions for America's explosion of wealth and creativity" in the late 20th century, a process that BusinessWeek said, "shook America's defeatist establishment out of its gloom." The Sunday Times of London said, "The restructuring job started by Mike Milken has been completed by the globalisation of many markets." And Richard Lowry wrote in The National Review, "Financial innovators like Michael Milken punished inefficiency and stoked competition."