At a Conference Where CEOs Manage $15 Trillion, Michael Milken Did the Math Out Loud: A Single $10,800 Deposit Becomes $1 Million — But Only if You Hit 1 Number

Two numbers reach the same destination. Put away $25,000 every year for forty years and earn nothing on it, and you will have a million dollars. Or make one deposit of $10,800, earn 12 percent a year for those same forty years, and you arrive at the same place… having contributed less than half of one percent as much.

Michael Milken laid that comparison out on stage at the Milken Institute Global Conference in May 2026 while moderating a conversation between BlackRock (BLK) CEO Larry Fink and Brookfield Corporation (BN) (BAM) CEO Bruce Flatt. "So when Japan was yielding close to zero, if you wanted to save a million dollars, you had to put away $25,000 a year for 40 years for your retirement at zero," he said. "If you could get 12 percent that Bruce is throwing out here, a one-time contribution of $10,800 gets you to a million." His conclusion: "So it is the rate of return."

The arithmetic checks out. Twelve percent compounded over forty years multiplies a sum by 93.05. Multiply $10,800 by 93.05, and you get $1,004,950. Run it the other way, and the exact figure required is $10,746.80, so Milken's number is a rounded-up version of the right one. The zero-return leg needs no calculator: forty payments of $25,000 is a million dollars, and not a cent more.

The 12 percent came from Flatt, who had just been asked how a long-term mindset shapes the way Brookfield allocates capital. "So, the greatest miracle of investing, finance, in fact, almost everything, is compounding of everything," he said. "Compounding interest, compounding returns, compounding knowledge, compounding wealth." Then the part that gives the number its edge: "If you can earn north of 12, nothing else matters. So don't try to earn 35. It's good if you earn 35. But don't try to earn 35. Earn 12 every year for very long periods of time. Just witness Berkshire Hathaway. (BRK.B) (BRK.A). "

That is an argument against a particular kind of ambition. Flatt is not saying large returns are bad; he is saying that reaching for them tends to cost you the consistency that does the actual work, and that consistency is where the compounding lives.

Now the fine print, which is where most versions of this comparison quietly go wrong. Twelve percent is a nominal figure, before tax, before fees, and before inflation. Assume 3 percent annual inflation over those forty years, and the million dollars at the end buys what $306,557 buys today. The arithmetic is intact; the million is simply not a million in the sense a reader instinctively hears it.

The bigger caveat is the rate itself. Flatt was describing what a large private-asset manager targets across long-horizon institutional vehicles, not a return available at retail. Substitute a figure closer to the long-run nominal return commonly cited for broad U.S. equities, around 10 percent, and the required one-time deposit rises from $10,800 to $22,095. Two percentage points, sustained for forty years, roughly doubles the entry ticket. Drop to 8 percent, and it climbs again, steeply.

That sensitivity is the real content here, and it cuts both ways. It is why Milken's point about the rate of return is correct: small differences in rate overwhelm large differences in contribution across long horizons. It is also why the headline figure should be treated as an illustration of a mechanism rather than a plan. Furthermore, it further assumes forty uninterrupted years with no withdrawal, no panic sale, and no gap in employment, which is a demanding assumption about a human life rather than about a spreadsheet.

Milken also disclosed his own position in the firms on stage, “I'm an investor both in BlackRock and in Brookfield,” and closed the session with a story about how badly Wall Street once handled this kind of arithmetic. "We've come a long way from 1968, when I gave the speech on Wall Street: what was the rate of return if you went up 100 one year and went down 50 the next year? And everyone told me it was 25 percent a year. 100 minus 50 divided by 2, even though it was zero." Up 100 percent and then down 50 percent does leave you exactly where you started, and averaging the two percentages produces a confident, wrong answer.

Fink, in the same conversation, put the corollary in blunter terms, saying that "having your money in a bank account is one of the worst financial decisions of a lifetime." That is a contestable claim and a self-interested one: he runs the world's largest asset manager. But it is the same mechanism seen from the other end: over a forty-year horizon, the rate is the variable that dominates, and zero is a rate.