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The Creation of Knowledge Universe
Brothers Michael and Lowell Milken, together with Oracle founder Larry Ellison, created Knowledge Universe in 1996, initially investing $1.5 billion in the enterprise. Michael Milken has stated that the idea for something like Knowledge Universe actually came to him when he saw the devastation of the Watts riots in Los Angeles in 1965. Returning to the University of California at Berkeley, he changed his major from mathematics to business, the story goes, and decided to dedicate himself to social progress through the development of what came to be called “human capital,” a concept put forth by a friend, Gary Becker, who would later (1992) win the Nobel Prize in economics.2
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