Lowell Milken

He is the second son of Bernard and Ferne Milken; his older brother Michael was born in 1946 and a sister Joni born in 1958.

Lowell Jay Milken (born November 29, 1948) is an American businessman, philanthropist, and the co-founder and chairman of the Milken Family Foundation.

Lowell Jay Milken was born on November 29, 1948, in Los Angeles and grew up in Encino, California.

The family moved to the San Fernando Valley in 1953, where Lowell attended LAUSD public schools, including Hesby Elementary School in Encino, Portola Junior High School in Tarzana, and Birmingham High School in Van Nuys.

Milken graduated Phi Beta Kappa and summa cum laude from the University of California, Berkeley where he won the business department's top student award.

He earned a J.D. degree from the University of California, Los Angeles, where he was a member of the Order of the Coif honor society and an editor of the UCLA Law Review.

Milken graduated in the top ten percent of his class at UCLA School of Law.

After graduating from UCLA Law, Milken joined the law firm of Irell & Manella, where he specialized in business and tax law.

He spent four years working as an associate at the Los Angeles-based firm.

Milken particularly enjoyed and excelled at the tax-study lunches at Irell & Manella, where a senior attorney at the firm presented a complicated case and the lawyers in attendance attempted to come up with unique solutions.

In 1979, he joined Drexel Burnham Lambert's High Yield and Convertible Bond Department, also known as the "junk bond" department.

In 1985, he created the Milken Educator Awards, widely considered the preeminent teacher recognition program in the nation.

His brother Michael Milken had moved the operation to Los Angeles the year before, and he hired Lowell to serve as a departmental senior vice-president until he resigned in 1989.

His duties were reported to be "mostly administrative", but he also provided financial analysis of companies.

Lowell was most interested in bankruptcies and distressed finances where he was able to utilize his tax policy experience from Irell & Manella.

He was not a registered representative with any securities exchange.

In March 1989, after a long investigation, the government indicted Michael with 98 counts of racketeering and fraud.

The indictment also named Lowell in two charges of racketeering and 11 counts of fraud.

Michael pleaded guilty and went to prison.

Milken is a former senior vice-president in the High-yield debt department for Drexel Burnham Lambert, which was forced into bankruptcy in 1990, and was headed by his brother Michael Milken.

"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.

In articles in the Los Angeles Times and The New York Times published in 1990, Lowell was characterized as an "unassuming family man" being used as a "bargaining chip", indicted only to put pressure on his brother.

As part of that deal, the government dropped all charges against Lowell Milken, but in March 1991, he was barred from working in the securities industry as part of a settlement with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

It has been suggested that the government indicted Lowell in order to put pressure on Michael to settle the case against him, a tactic condemned as unethical by some legal scholars.

In 1992, Lowell Milken funded $1.6 million to back a lawsuit against author James B. Stewart for a passage written in Stewart's book, Den of Thieves, which was about the insider trading scandals during the 1980s.

In the lawsuit, Michael F. Armstrong, the criminal defense lawyer who represented Lowell Milken, alleged that the book wrongly accused Armstrong of preparing a false affidavit for a witness to sign to exonerate Lowell Milken.

An Associate Justice of the Supreme Court in New York found that the passage concerning Armstrong and the affidavit were true or substantially true and that defendants were protected by the defenses of "opinion" and the "single instance" rule and dismissed the charges.

Lowell has served as chairman of Heron International, a London-based property investment and development company, for over 20 years.

Lowell also serves as Chairman of National Realty Trust Inc., the largest property owner of early childhood centers in the United States.

In 1996, Lowell co-founded Knowledge Universe with Michael Milken and Larry Ellison.

In 2000, he was named one of America's most generous philanthropists by Worth magazine and has been listed for the past 7 years in the Los Angeles Business Journal’s LA500 list of the most influential and impactful executives in Los Angeles.

In 2003, they became the sole owners of the company.

In the United States, Knowledge Universe Education Holdings Inc. became the largest early childhood education company and operated under the KinderCare Learning Centers, Knowledge Beginnings, CCLC, The Grove School, Champions and Cambridge Schools brands.

He is also the founder of the National Institute for Excellence in Teaching, TAP System for Teacher and Student Advancement as well as co-founder of Knowledge Universe, the world’s largest provider of early childhood education from 2005 until 2016.

He is known for his advocacy and nonprofit leadership focused on K-12 American education reform.

In 2017, he was the recipient of the James Bryant Conant Award for exceptional contributions to American Education.

Lowell Milken has founded several more nonprofit organizations, including the Lowell Milken Family Foundation and the Lowell Milken Center for Unsung Heroes.

In 2020, National Realty Trust raised $415 million of new equity and is now a private real estate investment trust.

Milken also is leading more than $1.5 billion of property development and investment in Reno, Nevada.

One project, Comstock Commerce Center, is a 688-acre, 7.9 million-plus square-foot development of advanced manufacturing, data center, and logistics.