The billionaire Atlanta philanthropist Bernie Marcus, who gave at least $2 billion to charity during his lifetime personally and through his Marcus Foundation, died Monday night. He was 95.
Marcus credited his success as a businessman and philanthropist to his hardscrabble upbringing in Newark, N.J., and to the fortitude his Russian and Ukrainian Jewish immigrant parents displayed in the face of poverty and illness. His mother taught him and his siblings the Jewish concept of tzedakah, the moral obligation to give back, by putting spare coins into a small metal box and giving that money to others in need.
“My mother used to say, ‘The more you give, the more you get.’ And in my case, it’s been true,” Marcus told the Chronicle last year.
Marcus graduated from Rutgers University’s pharmacy school in 1954 and worked as a pharmacist before going into the retail industry. In 1978, he co-founded the home improvement giant Home Depot with fellow businessmen Arthur Blank and Kenneth Langone, both of whom went on to become major philanthropists in their own right. The men took the company public in 1981, and Marcus retired in 2002. At the time of his death, Forbes pegged Marcus’s net worth at $11 billion.
Marcus’s biggest donations went to varied causes and organizations. He started his Marcus Foundation in 1989 and made several significant big bets in Atlanta. Among them was the Marcus Autism Center, a research and treatment center for children on the autism spectrum, to which Marcus gave roughly $100 million over the years.
He also pledged up to $200 million 20 years ago to build the Georgia Aquarium — and ended up giving the nonprofit $250 million. He appeared on the Chronicle’s 2023 Philanthropy 50 list of the biggest donors.
In later years, Marcus devoted the bulk of his grant making to nonprofits that help children, promote free enterprise, support Jewish groups, and back medical research and veterans programs. He told the Chronicle last year that he planned to give at least 90 percent of his wealth to his Atlanta-based foundation and that he put in place a plan to shutter the grant maker 20 years after his death.
That way, he said, his money would be given to the causes he supported during his lifetime and by foundation staff who truly understood his intentions.
Marcus also give significant sums — about $70 million in recent years — to support Republican political candidates and causes. He was a vocal supporter of former president Donald Trump and batted away criticism for backing the onetime reality television star. When asked how he would like to be remembered after his death, Marcus told the Chronicle that he hoped people would remember him for the good he did through his philanthropy.
“Look, whatever they say about me, some of them will come out and say, ‘Well, he supported Trump; he must be a schmuck,” but I hope that’s not the overriding thing,” Marcus said. “I hope they remember me as being a good person who never did any damage to anybody. I was good to the people who worked for me, and I hope they will remember me as a good employer, a good friend, somebody who cared about them. That’s all I want to achieve in life.”
