Phil Knight: The Oregon Runner Who Built Nike
Phil Knight watching the Oregon Ducks play the USC Trojans in 2010. Photo: Neon Tommy / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0
Phil Knight was born in Portland on February 24, 1938, and he has spent most of his life building things within a few hours’ drive of that city. The best known of them is Nike, the athletic company he co-founded with his former track coach. By late 2025 he was also one of the most prominent donors in the country, with Oregon institutions receiving much of the money.
Philip Hampson Knight grew up in the Eastmoreland neighborhood of Portland and attended Cleveland High School. His father, Bill Knight, was a lawyer who became a newspaper publisher. Knight ran middle-distance races at the University of Oregon and finished a business degree there in 1959. He then earned an MBA from Stanford’s Graduate School of Business in 1962.
From a handshake to a shoe company
Before he had a company, Knight worked as a certified public accountant, first at Coopers & Lybrand and later at Price Waterhouse. In November 1962 he was in Kobe, Japan, where he found Onitsuka Tiger running shoes and arranged to distribute them in the western United States.
He partnered with Bill Bowerman, his coach at Oregon. According to Knight’s Wikipedia biography, the two agreed to the arrangement with a handshake on January 25, 1964, which is treated as the founding date of Blue Ribbon Sports. The company sold Japanese shoes at first, then moved into designing its own.
In 1971 the business took the name Nike. The name was suggested by Jeff Johnson, an early employee. That same year the company paid Carolyn Davidson $35 for the swoosh logo. Both details are recorded in Knight’s biography.
Leaving the corner office
Knight led the company for decades. He resigned as chief executive on November 18, 2004, and stayed on as chairman. William Perez took over as CEO, and Mark Parker replaced Perez in 2006. In June 2015 Knight said he would step down as chairman, and he left the board at the end of June 2016.
In April 2016 Simon & Schuster published his memoir, Shoe Dog, which covers the early years of Blue Ribbon Sports. The 2023 film Air, about Nike’s pursuit of Michael Jordan, includes Knight as a character played by Ben Affleck.
Outside Nike, Knight took a stake in the animation house Will Vinton Studios in 1998 and later bought it. It was renamed Laika, and its first feature film, Coraline, came out in 2009. His son Travis Knight became the studio’s chief executive and president.
A donor on a national scale
Knight and his wife, Penny, whom he married in 1968, have given money on a scale few Americans match. They have three children. Their son Matthew died in a scuba diving accident in El Salvador in 2004, and the University of Oregon’s Matthew Knight Arena was named for him in 2011.
The family’s giving runs through the Philip H. Knight Charitable Foundation Trust, which Knight founded in 1990. The largest gifts have gone to three schools:
- Stanford: $105 million to the business school in 2006, $400 million in 2016 to create the Knight-Hennessy Scholars program, and $75 million in 2022 for brain resilience research.
- University of Oregon: his alma mater has received more than $2 billion across his lifetime, by one count.
- Oregon Health & Science University: on August 14, 2025, OHSU announced that the Knights planned to give $2 billion to its Knight Cancer Institute.
OHSU called the pledge the largest single donation to a college in the United States, ahead of Michael Bloomberg’s $1.8 billion gift to Johns Hopkins in 2018. Under the plan, the money is to be paid over 10 years. The cancer institute is to become a self-governed entity within OHSU with its own board, which the university said would let it hire faculty and set pay as it competes for researchers nationally. About a decade earlier, the Knights gave OHSU $500 million on the condition that the university match it dollar for dollar within two years.
The Chronicle of Philanthropy ranked Knight as the second-largest donor in the U.S. in 2023, and as the top donor in 2025.
Wealth and politics
Forbes put Knight’s net worth at $35.4 billion in October 2025. He lives on a rural property outside Hillsboro, Oregon, and also owns a home in La Quinta, California.
Knight is a registered Republican. His political giving has not stayed with one party: in the 2022 Oregon governor’s race he backed both Republican Christine Drazan and independent Betsy Johnson.
Through the first week of December 2025, then, the picture was of a man in his late 80s who had stepped away from Nike’s boardroom nearly a decade earlier but remained one of the biggest financial forces in Oregon higher education and medical research.
Sources: Wikipedia’s Phil Knight entry; Oregon Public Broadcasting on the 2025 OHSU gift.
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