Home Depot founder dies at 95

(JTA) - Bernie Marcus, the billionaire who co-founded Home Depot and became a Republican megadonor and supporter of civic and political causes in the United States and Israel, has died.

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.

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.

"The Home Depot is deeply saddened by the passing of our beloved founder, Bernard Marcus," the company he founded in 1978 said in a statement announcing Marcus' death. "To us, he was simply 'Bernie.'"

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.

Born to Jewish immigrants in Newark, New Jersey, in 1929, Marcus "never lost sight of his humble roots, using his success not for fame or fortune but to generously help others," the company said.

Among Marcus' 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.

"The State of Israel lost one of its greatest friends, and I have lost my wisest mentor," IDI President Yohanan Plesner said in a statement.

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's election despite the former president's felony convictions and his "brash style."

"We must change the current trajectory of the nation and solve the problems created in the last three years," Marcus wrote in November 2023 in an oped endorsing Trump. "We must also reject calls from some politicians to replace our free market system with big government socialism."

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' politics.

Unlike Adelson, his peer in philanthropy and Republican politics, Marcus donated money in Israel while making sure to avoid taking sides in the country's 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.

His philanthropy in Israel was rooted in his sense of identity. "I'm proud of the fact that I'm Jewish and what happened with the Holocaust is not going to happen again if I can do anything about it," he said in an extensive profile published by Philanthropy Magazine in 2012.

Born months before the start of the Great Depression, Marcus was raised in a tenement in Newark, New Jersey by immigrant parents from Russia.

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' parents couldn't 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.)

He didn't 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.

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.

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.

In Marcus' 19 years as CEO, Home Depot became a ubiquitous American brand. He remained chair of the company's board of directors until 2002 when he left to focus on giving away the wealth he had accumulated.

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.

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.

Marcus took pride in his company's record of ingraining the value of tzedakah, or charity, in his employees. "Kids come out of working at Home Depot and they all have this feeling of tzedakah. I turned them all into Jews!" he was once quoted as saying.

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.

An employee's struggles parenting a child with autism spurred Marcus' 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.

Also in the realm of heath, he was a major donor to Atlanta's Shepherd Center for spinal and brain injury rehabilitation, and the founding donor of a neuroscience institute at the Boca Raton Regional Hospital in Florida.

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 "not the brightest people in the world." In contrast, he said, he was careful to give in ways that advanced his values.

Marcus is survived by his wife and stepson; his children from his first marriage; and grandchildren, for whom he said his 2022 book, "Kick Up Some Dust: Lessons on Thinking Big, Giving Back, and Doing It Yourself," was intended.