Bernie Marcus was a man of second acts.
Marcus co-founded Home Depot at age 49 after getting fired. After the home improvement chain's success made him a billionaire, he became a prolific philanthropist, a Republican megadonor and a cheerleader for capitalism.
Marcus died at the age of 95 on Monday.
He grew up barely scraping by in a New Jersey tenement, a son of immigrants who ran to the U.S. at the dawn of the 20th century to escape antisemitism in Russia and Ukraine.
"I remember walking down the street when I was 17 years old and I said, 'If I can have a house with a porch, I'll be a very happy person,'" Marcus once told Fox Business.
He described his mother's lessons in being headstrong: never dwell — dwelling is for losers. And indeed, his life came to illustrate the power of a Plan B.
When Marcus couldn't get into medical school because of quotas limiting Jewish students, he instead went to pharmacy school. It put him on a path to drugstores and retail, eventually joining the conglomerate Daylin. That company put Marcus in charge of a home improvement chain called Handy Dan — and introduced him to Arthur Blank, his future Home Depot co-founder.
How Home Depot began
Marcus and Blank got fired from Handy Dan together in 1978 in a corporate power struggle. A business partner joked that they got kicked in the rear end by a golden horseshoe. Over a year of meetings in a Los Angeles coffee shop, the pair hatched a new business to leapfrog not only their former employer, but the entire industry.
"Bernie is a combination of brother and a father-figure — and a rabbi," Blank told NPR's How I Built This in 2017. "He's a great storyteller and a great joke-teller ... and I'm a great audience. He would tell the same stories, and I would keep laughing at the same stories. ... It was like a very good marriage."
The first two Home Depot stores, which the pair had considered naming Bad Bernie's Buildall, opened in Atlanta in 1979. The idea was to gather all home-improvement needs under one vast roof, cheaper than rivals, to encourage people to tackle DIY projects.
Home Depot hired master plumbers and other craftsmen to teach people how to do it themselves and accepted returns with no questions asked. In the early days, if a shopper didn't find something at Home Depot, Marcus — the CEO — would chase after them, get their address and hand-deliver the missing item, which he'd buy at a rival store and charge his shopper a lower price.
"What happened was that we actually changed America," Marcus said in an interview with the Best Practice Institute.
By 1990, Home Depot grew into the largest home improvement chain, eventually employing half a million workers. In 2002, Marcus retired as one of the richest people in America.
Spending his billions
Marcus committed to giving away 90% of his net worth, describing how even in poverty, his parents had set aside money for charity. And he urged business leaders to follow suit, telling Yahoo Finance that "the same brains that created their wealth can create good things for society."
Marcus funded the massive Georgia Aquarium and a leading center for autism. He invested in Jewish organizations, medical research on brain-related injuries and groups working with military veterans.
He also launched a conservative advocacy group called the Job Creators Network, which has lobbied against higher taxes and student loan forgiveness. As a major political donor, Marcus spent millions of dollars backing Republican candidates, including Donald Trump. He also recently gave $1 million to a pro-Israel political action committee.
Over time, Marcus took up many Republican talking points, charging against critical race theory, fears of socialism and "woke crap." But his central grievances tended to be regulation and big government as he evangelized profusely for capitalism.
"My family had no money — and look where I am today," Marcus said on Fox in 2023. "It could only have happened in America and, frankly, it could only happen under the system that we have, which is the system of free enterprise and capitalism."
Marcus said he wished to live to 100 to oversee the spending of his life's earnings. At 93, he told one interviewer he planned to keep going until he got carried out in a wooden box — hopefully, he said, made with wood from Home Depot.
NPR's Sarah Knight contributed to this report.
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