MILKEN INSTITUTE GLOBAL CONFERENCE
Early May · The Beverly Hilton, Beverly Hills · Four Days · Since 1998
The Milken Institute Global Conference is four days of finance and policy in early May at the Beverly Hilton, on Wilshire Boulevard in Beverly Hills. Some five thousand people come, and passes start at twenty-five thousand dollars.
The panels are the published part. The reason to come is everything that is not on the programme.
The Financier
The conference takes its name from the Milken Institute, a think tank in Santa Monica founded in 1991, and the Institute takes its name from Michael Milken.
In the 1980s Milken built the market in high-yield bonds at Drexel Burnham Lambert, and was paid more than a billion dollars over four years for it. In 1990 he pleaded guilty to six counts of securities and tax violations. He served twenty-two months, was barred from the securities industry for life, and was found to have advanced prostate cancer the month he was released.
He gave much of the next thirty years to medical research, and in 2020 he was pardoned.
The first conference was held in 1998.
The Rooms
The programme fills the ballrooms of the Beverly Hilton and, in 2026, the Waldorf Astoria beside it: ministers, central bankers, the heads of funds and chief executives, on stage from breakfast until the evening. Recent stages have held a former president, the head of the IMF, the chief executive of Nvidia and a queen.
The sessions are streamed. The meetings are not.
They are held in the lobby, the suites and the restaurants, and they are the reason most of the room has paid.
The evenings belong to dinners in the hills, and the hardest thing to get all week is an invitation to one of them.
What to Know
Passes are issued by the Institute and start at twenty-five thousand dollars. The price buys the building, not the rooms that matter.
A lounge suit. Beverly Hills dresses down for most of the year, and not for this week.
The two hotels fill first. A room should be booked the day the pass is confirmed.
Davos opens the year’s circuit in January, and Sun Valley and the Clinton Global Initiative follow later in the year. Milken is the spring’s.
The mistake is to spend the four days in the ballroom. Anything said on a stage can be watched later from anywhere.
The Court
The Milken Institute Global Conference is not the Court’s own, and the Court will not pretend it can put a member into the rooms that matter. Passes are the Institute’s to issue, and the dinners around it are by invitation. For a member who holds a pass, the Court arranges the whole of the week: getting there, where to stay near the hotel, and the table afterward.
How one becomes a member is set out under Admission.
Set down September MMXXVI