Home Depot co-founder Bernie Marcus dies at age 95 : NPR

Bernie Marcus was a man in the second act.

Marcus co-founded Home Depot at the age of 49 after being laid off. After the success of the home improvement chain made him a billionaire, he became a prolific philanthropist, a Republican mega-donor and a cheerleader for capitalism.

Marcus died on Monday at the age of 95.

He grew up scraping by in a tenement in New Jersey, the son of immigrants who fled to the United States in the early 20th century to escape anti-Semitism in Russia and Ukraine.

“I remember walking down the street when I was 17 years old and I said, ‘If I can get a house with a front porch, I’ll be a very happy person,'” Marcus once told Fox Business .

He described his mother’s lessons in being headstrong: never linger – housing 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 went to pharmacy school instead. That put him on the path to pharmacies and retail, eventually joining conglomerate Daylin. That company put Marcus in charge of a home improvement chain called Handy Dan — and introduced him to Arthur Blank, his future co-founder of Home Depot.

How Home Depot Started

Marcus and Blank were fired from Handy Dan together in 1978 in a corporate power struggle. A business partner joked that they were kicked in the rear by a golden horseshoe. Over a year meetings in a coffee shop in Los Angelesthe couple hatched a new business to leapfrog not only their former employer, but the entire industry.

“Bernie is a combination of a 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 kept laughing at the same stories … It was like a very good marriage.

The first two Home Depot stores, which the couple had considered naming Bad Bernies Buildall, opened in Atlanta in 1979. The idea was to bring all home improvement needs under one big roof, cheaper than the competition, to encourage people to tackle DIY projects.

Home Depot hired plumbers and other tradesmen to teach people how to do it themselves and accepted returns, no questions asked. In the early days, if a shopper couldn’t find something at Home Depot, Marcus—the CEO—would hunt them down, get their address, and hand-deliver the missing item, which he would buy at a rival store and charge his shopper a lower price.

“What happened was we actually changed America,” Marcus said in an interview with Best Practice Institute.

By 1990, Home Depot grew into the largest home improvement chain that eventually employed half a million workers. In 2002, Marcus retired as one of the richest people in America.

Spends his billions

Marcus committed to giving away 90% of his net worth and described how his parents, even in poverty, had set money aside for charity. And he urged business leaders to follow suit, telling Yahoo Finance that “the same minds that created their wealth can create good things for society.”

Marcus financed the huge Georgia Aquarium and a leading center for autism. He invested in Jewish organizations, medical research into 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 supports 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, indicting critical race theory, fear of socialism, and “woke up shit.” But his central grievances tended to be regulation and big government, as he evangelized fiercely for capitalism.

“My family had no money — and look where I am today,” Marcus said on Fox in 2023. “That could only have happened in America, and frankly, it could only have happened under the system that we have, which is the with free initiative and capitalism.”

Marcus said he wanted to live to 100 to monitor the use of his life’s earnings. At 93, he told an interviewer he planned to stay until he was carried out in a wooden box — hopefully, he said, made with wood from Home Depot.

NPR’s Sarah Knight contributed to this report.