Bernard Marcus, the son of Russian-Jewish immigrants who rose from a tenement in Newark, N.J., to create one of the world’s biggest and most recognizable brands, the Home Depot Corp., died on Oct. 20, at his home in Boca Raton, Fla. He was 95.
Marcus’ death was confirmed by an official at his nonprofit group, the Jobs Creator Network, who said he died of natural causes.
Marcus is best known as one of the founders of Home Depot, teaming up with financier Ken Langone and businessman Arthur Blank to create from scratch a company that employs nearly a half-million people working in thousands of stores across the country.
Along the way he accumulated a fortune; he is said to be worth some $6 billion.
Home Depot with its 2,300 locations is the nation’s largest chain of its types, its stock-market value tops $400 billion.
Yet neither his wealth nor the basics of the Home Depot story — idea of a nationwide chain of home-improvement stores he floated 50 years ago to Langone after he was fired as CEO of a hardware chain — doesn’t do total justice to Marcus’ legacy.
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.
As the 2024 election neared, he geared up for another battle: To help elect his friend, Donald Trump, president for a second time and save the country from what he believed was the crippling effects of progressive policies foisted on the American public by Joe Biden and his vice president, the current Democratic presidential nominee, Kamala Harris.
Even in his mid 90s, the only thing that appeared to slow down Marcus was the debilitating effects of old age, or as he put it to me in an interview last December “Charlie, I’m 94 years old. Unfortunately, I have a 60-year-old brain, a 94-year-old body.”
