Nike co-founder and chairman Phil Knight may bleed Oregon green, but that didn't stop him from showing some major love to the university that helped shape his business acumen.
Fortune reports that Knight recently made a record-breaking $400 million donation to Stanford University, the school where he earned his MBA in 1962. The massive donation is the biggest that Stanford has ever received, and also ties hedge fund manager John Paulson's 2015 donation to Harvard as the largest amount ever given to a university.
Stanford plans to use the donation to start a new program known as the Knight-Hennessy Scholars which will serve as an alternative to Rhodes scholarships, providing students with a "global, multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary program, supported by Stanford's seven graduate schools that foster service, collaboration, innovation and entrepreneurship."
This is only the latest example in a laundry list of recent donations by Knight. Last year, he gave $500 million to cancer research and in 2006, he blessed the Stanford Graduate School of Business with $105 million. That's not even accounting for his numerous undisclosed donations to Oregon, which would likely eclipse many of these numbers.
