Israeli-Russian entrepreneur Yuri Milner is donating $10 million to the Wharton School to create scholarships for Israeli MBA students, announced the University of Pennsylvania on Tuesday.
It will fund degrees over the next decade for 60 Israeli students in the business school, whose MBA program is two years.
Those who have completed Israeli military service, attended an Israeli undergraduate institution or worked at an Israeli company will be eligible for the fellowship from the Friends of Israel MBA Fund.
“We are thrilled by the foundation’s commitment to supporting the best and brightest MBA candidates from the Israeli community,” said Wharton School dean Erika James in a statement.
Also in the statement, Milner said “my hope is that this scholarship will support talented individuals to look beyond the horizon and pursue their vision of what the world can be, and that the State of Israel will benefit from the expertise in business and entrepreneurship that Wharton program graduates will bring back home.”
Born in Russia, Milner graduated from Moscow State University in 1985 with a degree in theoretical physics and attended Wharton in the 1990s, though he did not graduate with an MBA.
The 58-year-old was a commencement speaker at the Wharton MBA graduation ceremony in 2017.
Milner has a net worth of $4.4 billion, according to Forbes, and is known to be Russia’s most influential tech investor. He was an early investor in Facebook, Twitter, Spotify, Airbnb, Alibaba and other major companies.
An Israeli citizen, he currently lives in the Bay Area in California.
