Home Depot Co-Founder Bernie Marcus Passes Away at 95
Rest in peace, Bernie, a true American patriot.
Bernard Marcus, 95, passed away at his home in Boca Raton, FL, home late Monday night.
Marcus co-founded Home Depot with financier Ken Langone and businessman Arthur Blank.
The entire Home Depot family is deeply saddened by the death of our co-founder Bernie Marcus. He’s left us with an invaluable legacy and the backbone of our company: our values and our culture. He will be tremendously missed. https://t.co/qdgssDmBdX pic.twitter.com/yaA79cGlea
— The Home Depot (@HomeDepot) November 5, 2024
Marcus was a true American patriot who loved the country and free-market capitalism, which he credited with pulling him out of poverty:
He’s a voluble billionaire capitalist, a fixture on Fox News and Fox Business where he took pride in evangelizing about the power of free-market capitalism to pull people out of poverty as it did for him.
He was also a philanthropist, having given many millions of it away to charities and politicians he believes can make a difference in pushing free-market solutions and protecting the entrepreneur class.
A little more than a decade ago, he created a free-market advocacy group, the Job Creators Network, which lobbies on behalf of small businesses.
Marcus was born in 1929 to Russian Jewish immigrants who raised him in Newark, New Jersey. His family was too poor to send him to medical school, so he enrolled in pharmacy school at Rutgers.
With a degree in hand, Marcus worked at O’Dell’s and Vornado, climbing the corporate ladder hard.
Marcus worked his way up to become Chairman of the Board and President of Handy Dan Improvement Centers, where he met Blank.
Handy Dan fired Marcus when he was 49 years old:
The watershed moment in Bernie’s career came when he was fired from Handy Dan in April 1978, along with Arthur and Ron Brill. Bernie was faced with the prospect of reinventing himself at 49. He already had a vision of a one-stop shop for do-it-yourselfers, something that did not exist in the home improvement retail landscape at the time. Investment banker Ken Langone helped secure the financing to get The Home Depot started.
The following year, the first Home Depot stores opened in Atlanta, beginning a remarkable journey. From those first stores in 1979, Bernie and his fellow founders grew a business that created jobs worldwide — eventually employing more than 500,000 associates.
Growing up poor put life in perspective for Bernie. He never forgot where he came from or his mother, who, despite not having much, was beyond generous:
Over the years he had an enormous influence on healthcare in Atlanta. With his wife Billi, Bernie started The Marcus Institute, which today is the Marcus Autism Center, a not-for-profit subsidiary of Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta that treats more than 5,500 children with autism and related disorders a year.
Bernie also helped create Project Share in conjunction with The Shepherd Center in Atlanta, renowned for the treatment of brain and spinal injuries. To ensure that members of the military and veterans get diagnosed and cared for without financial constraint, The Marcus Foundation underwrote the housing, transportation and care costs of any military personnel with brain or spinal injuries who are sent to Shepherd. Bernie and Billi were inducted into the National Spinal Cord Injury Association’s Hall of Fame for their tireless efforts in this area.
In 1999, Bernie, Arthur and Ken started The Homer Fund to take care of Home Depot associates who suffer unexpected hardships. Contributions from associates to The Homer Fund perfectly demonstrate our value of Taking Care of Our People. Since its founding, The Homer Fund has helped more than 194,000 associates.
Bernie and Billi joined The Giving Pledge in 2010, a commitment to give away most of their money during their lifetime.
“To make quarterly profit is one thing, but changing just one life is so much better,” Bernie wrote in a letter to Warren Buffett.
Marcus made major contributions to the following: Georgia Tech Marcus Center for Therapeutic Cell Characterization and Manufacturing, Grady Hospital’s Marcus Trauma and Emergency Center, the Marcus Heart and Vascular Center at Piedmont Atlanta Hospital, and the Construction Education Foundation of Georgia.
Marcus never apologized for loving the free markets and capitalism.
Bernie and his wife also made numerous contributions to the Republican Party. His support for Donald Trump in 2016, 2020, and even 2024 led to many calls from the left to boycott Home Depot.
The pair never backed down.
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Comments
Hopefully Bernie already voted. RIP
Good businessman, and greater man.
He was always very interesting in his appearances on FoxNews and a much more down to earth view of Americans.
rip
another rags to wealth story that many of us have
Well I don’t have that kind of wealth by far, but he deserved it
A great friend of DJT
His children, don’t k ow much about them, next generation usually doesn’t have the same courage
I’ve been shopping at home depot since the early 80’s. I took classes there and learned how to lay tile and replace faucets. I remodeled my bathroom with the info I learned. They were invaluable to a single woman (at the time) who wanted to be able to do upgrades and make normal home repairs without hiring someone else.
He created hundreds of thousands of jobs in his company and probably created many more in all the companies that Home Depot did business with.
Just think of all the lives he changed for the better. A truly great man.