He Sold Education Like Cars — Then Cloned His Dead Dog for $20M
In December of 2007, three dogs were born in a California laboratory, each identical to a dog named Missy, who had been dead for years. The man who spent twenty million dollars and seven years to make that happen had, a few decades earlier, built the largest private university in the United States starting with eight students and no investors. What kind of mind builds both things?
In this episode, we trace John Glen Sperling's path from a sharecropper's son in the Missouri Ozarks to the founder of the University of Phoenix, asking what happens when a man treats education, longevity, and even grief as problems to be solved with enough capital and enough time.
Person: John Glen Sperling
Location: Phoenix, Arizona
Date: 1976
Case: the founding of the University of Phoenix and the twenty-million-dollar Missyplicity dog-cloning project
Status: university grew into a nearly seven-billion-dollar Nasdaq corporation; the dog clones were born in December 2007, after the company built to produce them had already closed
- Sperling founded Apollo Group in 1973 and opened the University of Phoenix in 1976 with a first class of eight students
- At its peak, the University of Phoenix enrolled 420,700 undergraduate students and 78,000 graduate students across more than 200 campuses worldwide
- By May 2001, Apollo Group's market capitalization reached almost seven billion dollars, trading on Nasdaq under the ticker APOL
- Sperling financed the Missyplicity Project through Genetic Savings and Clone in Sausalito, spending twenty million dollars over roughly seven years before the company closed in 2006
- He co-financed medical marijuana decriminalization campaigns with George Soros and Peter Lewis, and, according to Time magazine, had used marijuana himself in the 1960s to manage pain from cancer
- John Glen Sperling died on August 22, 2014, at the age of 93
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16 min