Home Depot founder Bernie Marcus poses for a portrait in a Home Depot store on Oct. 15, 1998. (Erik Lesser\/Liaison via Getty Images)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
Marcus, 95, died late Monday in Boca Raton, Florida. His death came on the eve of an election into which he had poured millions of dollars to support Donald Trump and Republicans across the country.<\/p>\n
In the final political donation recorded publicly before his death, made in July, Marcus gave $1 million to the United Democracy Project, a campaign fundraising group affiliated with the pro-Israel lobby AIPAC that Marcus has supported since its creation in 2022.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe Home Depot is deeply saddened by the passing of our beloved founder, Bernard Marcus,\u201d the company he founded in 1978 said in a statement announcing Marcus\u2019 death. \u201cTo us, he was simply \u2018Bernie.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
Over the course of his life, Marcus donated more than $2 billion to various causes, according to Forbes, and he leaves behind an estimated net worth of $11 billion that will mostly go to the Marcus Foundation.<\/p>\n
Born to Jewish immigrants in Newark, New Jersey, in 1929, Marcus \u201cnever lost sight of his humble roots, using his success not for fame or fortune but to generously help others,\u201d the company said.<\/p>\n
Among Marcus\u2019 legacies are the transformation of downtown Atlanta with the establishment of the Georgia Aquarium; a massive advance in autism awareness and research thanks to the Marcus Autism Center, also in Atlanta; and the founding of the Israel Democracy Institute in Jerusalem, an important think tank focused on governance.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe State of Israel lost one of its greatest friends, and I have lost my wisest mentor,\u201d IDI President Yohanan Plesner said in a statement.<\/p>\n
Toward the end of his life, Marcus, with his wife Billi, became perhaps best known for his staunch support of Donald Trump, second only to Sheldon Adelson among conservative Jewish megadonors. Marcus helped propel Trump into the White House in 2016 by contributing $7 million and gave even more four years later to finance his failed reelection campaign. Last year, he said he intended to support Trump again in this year\u2019s election despite the former president\u2019s felony convictions and his \u201cbrash style.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWe must change the current trajectory of the nation and solve the problems created in the last three years,\u201d Marcus wrote in November 2023 in an oped endorsing Trump. \u201cWe must also reject calls from some politicians to replace our free market system with big government socialism.\u201d<\/p>\n
Marcus also defended former Trump advisor Steve Bannon against charges of abetting antisemitism and extremism. At one point, Home Depot fended off calls to boycott the company over Marcus\u2019 politics.<\/p>\n
Unlike Adelson, his peer in philanthropy and Republican politics, Marcus donated money in Israel while making sure to avoid taking sides in the country\u2019s fractured parliamentary politics. In addition to the nonpartisan Israel Democracy Institute, he gave to causes like health care, including the Marcus National Blood Services Center, established with a $25 million donation.<\/p>\n
His philanthropy in Israel was rooted in his sense of identity. \u201cI\u2019m proud of the fact that I\u2019m Jewish and what happened with the Holocaust is not going to happen again if I can do anything about it,\u201d he said in an extensive profile published by Philanthropy Magazine in 2012.<\/p>\n
Where some focused on threats from without, Marcus worried primarily about how the country\u2019s own government structures were undermining its viability.<\/p>\n
\u201cUntil Israel has a constitution and a Bill of Rights, the rule of law is murky. And I\u2019m a great believer in the rule of law,\u201d he said in 2012. Israel still has no constitution.<\/p>\n
Born months before the start of the Great Depression, Marcus was raised in a tenement in Newark, New Jersey by immigrant parents from Russia.<\/p>\n
A teenager during World War II and its aftermath, he joined his family on trips to the Catskills where he performed magic and hypnotism. The experience of reading and satisfying an audience helped seed a dream of becoming a psychiatrist. But Marcus\u2019 parents couldn\u2019t afford to send him to medical school so he became a pharmacist instead. (He also said he was rejected because of quotas limiting Jewish enrollment.)<\/p>\n
He didn\u2019t much care for the technical side of the field, but he took a liking to sales. That realization led him to become a retail manager, taking ever larger roles until he came to a chain of hardware stores in Los Angeles.<\/p>\n
At age 49, after leaving the company amid corporate turmoil, Marcus joined Arthur Blank to found a new home improvement retailer with a vision that would transform the industry.<\/p>\n
The pair picked Atlanta as their starting point, found investors and quickly opened a number of stores under the Home Depot banner. They tapped into a massive unmet demand among Americans to fix up their own homes. Unlike the old-style of hardware stores, Home Depot offered a massive warehouse space that stocked not only tools but paint and lumber, which had typically required a visit to separate retailers.<\/p>\n
In Marcus\u2019 19 years as CEO, Home Depot became a ubiquitous American brand. He remained chair of the company\u2019s board of directors until 2002 when he left to focus on giving away the wealth he had accumulated.<\/p>\n
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In 2010, Marcus signed the Giving Pledge, the initiative by Bill Gates and Warren Buffet to encourage the ultra-wealthy to give away a majority of their money to charity. Then, in 2020, he joined the Jewish Future Pledge, a promise by its signers to earmark most of their wealth to Jewish or Israel-related causes.<\/p>\n
He had been raised to give away his money, Marcus said in an interview, pointing to the memory of his mother who sometimes denied him a nickel for ice cream, saying the coin was going toward planting trees in Israel instead.<\/p>\n
Marcus took pride in his company\u2019s record of ingraining the value of tzedakah, or charity, in his employees. \u201cKids come out of working at Home Depot and they all have this feeling of tzedakah. I turned them all into Jews!\u201d he was once quoted as saying.<\/p>\n
The largest and most notable acts of charity were not necessarily dedicated to Jewish causes. In Georgia, he was a major patron of civic institutions. In the late 1990s, Marcus and the then-governor of Georgia, Roy Barnes, flew back to Atlanta from a tour of Israel. During the flight, Marcus said he wanted to give a gift to the city of Atlanta, proposing an aquarium that could anchor a redevelopment of downtown. That conversation culminated in one of the largest facilities of its kind in the world, the Georgia Aquarium, which opened in 2005 thanks in large part to a $250 million donation from Marcus.<\/p>\n
An employee\u2019s struggles parenting a child with autism spurred Marcus\u2019 interest in the issue, which he championed by founding a world-leading institute, the Marcus Autism Center, and spearheading a research and advocacy group, Autism Speaks.<\/p>\n
Also in the realm of heath, he was a major donor to Atlanta\u2019s Shepherd Center for spinal and brain injury rehabilitation, and the founding donor of a neuroscience institute at the Boca Raton Regional Hospital in Florida.<\/p>\n
Marcus was also influential in the field of philanthropy itself, modeling a business-like mindset that always sought as large a return on a philanthropic investment as possible. His libertarian ideology and faith in the free market also drove his contributions to advocacy against government regulations.<\/p>\n
In his final years, Marcus grew increasingly concerned about antisemitism in the United States and on college campuses, which he said he thought had risen to the levels he experienced as a child and young adult prior to the founding of Israel. In a January 2023 video interview with the Jewish News Syndicate, he said Jews who donated to universities, which he said taught students to hate Judaism and Israel, were \u201cnot the brightest people in the world.\u201d In contrast, he said, he was careful to give in ways that advanced his values.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe are very careful with our giving. And we\u2019ve given away over $2 billion in the last several years, and in the places that we\u2019ve given it, we follow it very carefully,\u201d he said. \u201cWe check it. We make sure that the money is being spent the way it should be spent.\u201d<\/p>\n
Marcus is survived by his wife and stepson; his children from his first marriage; and grandchildren, for whom he said his 2022 book, \u201cKick Up Some Dust: Lessons on Thinking Big, Giving Back, and Doing It Yourself,\u201d was intended.<\/p>\n
\u201cI haven\u2019t been the greatest grandfather in the world because I\u2019ve been busy doing so many things,\u201d he said in the JNS interview. \u201cI wanted them to know all the things I\u2019m doing.\u201d<\/p>\n
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