Eli Broad, the respected and sometimes controversial Los Angeles philanthropist, died on Friday. He was 87. Known for being generous but also sharp-elbowed in his philanthropy, Broad and his wife, Edythe, gave nearly $2.5 billion from 2000 to 2013 to their Broad Foundations and other nonprofits, according to a Chronicle tally. In recent years, the couple gave significant sums to charity through their nearly $2 billion Broad Foundations, which houses the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation and the Broad Art Foundation .
Broad built what is now a nearly $7 billion fortune through his KB Home homebuilding company and SunAmerica, a financial-services company that he sold to AIG for $18 billion in 1998. He then went on to devote most of his time to the couple’s philanthropy, giving primarily to education, science, and the arts.
He and Edythe, who survives her husband, bankrolled stem-cell research centers at UCLA and UC San Francisco, University of Southern California, and Harvard. One of the couple’s crowning philanthropic achievements is the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, a biomedical research center that is run jointly by Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research.
The Broads gave $100 million in 2003 to launch the institute, which would go on to bring researchers together from a wide range of disciplines to fight disease and focus on other areas. At the height of the financial crisis in 2008, the Broads pledged $400 million to endow the institute, which has since become a major force in global genetics research.
Six weeks ago, the Broads gave the institute an additional $150 million through their foundations to support a new research center that combines biology and computer science into a new scientific discipline aimed at improving human health. The couple gave a total of more than $1 billion to the institute over the years.
Broad was also a longtime supporter of public-school systems and charter schools and gave more than $600 million through the foundations toward that effort.
Through the Broad Foundations, he established the Broad Prize for Urban Education as a way to highlight urban school districts that were successful at improving academic performance and reducing achievement gaps among low-income students and students of color. From 2002 to 2014, the prize awarded $16 million in scholarships to more than 1,200 students.
In late 2019, he pledged a $100 million grant through the Broad Foundations to Yale University to create the Broad Center at the Yale School of Management to support a tuition-free master’s degree program for public school-system leaders and an advanced management training program for public school-district superintendents.
Hands-On Trustee
He was an avid art collector and gave millions to two Southern California art museums — the Museum of Contemporary Art, in Los Angeles, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art — before giving $140 million to build his own Los Angeles art museum, the Broad, in 2015, which today houses much of the couple’s extensive contemporary art collection.
Broad got personally and sometimes controversially involved in his art museum support. He pledged $50 million to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 2003 for a modern-art wing and said he would donate pieces of his art collection, which included works by such luminaries as Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Rauschenberg, and many others. But he later changed his mind and decided to lend the museum some of the artworks through his private art foundation to make sure the Broads’ collection would be seen by the public rather than squirreled away in the museum’s vast storage centers.
He was the founding chairman of the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, a post he held from 1979 to 1984. In 2008, Broad gave what by then was a struggling but much beloved institution a $30 million grant to keep it afloat and stop it from merging with the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. He remained on the board of the Museum of Contemporary Art and was loudly criticized in 2010 when he helped bring in the art dealer Jeffrey Deitch to lead the museum. Deitch would later clash with others at the museum, including some board members who later resigned. But Broad took criticisms that he was an overly controlling donor in stride.
“Look, I go forward and advocate for things that I think make sense, that maybe haven’t been done before, that people think they’re not going to work, and I ask a lot of questions. Why not? My belief is that if you do the right thing at the end of the day, people applaud it and want to take credit for it — and respect me,” Broad said in an interview with the Chronicle in 2012. “But along the way, I don’t have a lot of time with all the things I’m doing to chitchat and play nice to everyone I meet. I don’t mean to offend anybody, but on the other hand, I want to get things done.”
