Long before he was a billionaire, Bernie Marcus’ immigrant mother stressed to her young American-born son how important it was to help others in need.
The man who would go on to co-found Atlanta-based Home Depot said he never forgot the lesson. And later in life he made a commitment: He would give away virtually all his wealth.
He also set a deadline for how to handle whatever he didn’t manage to donate before his death. His Marcus Foundation would get about 90% of however many billions of dollars remained. The board members — including Billi, his wife of 50 years, and two sons — would have 20 years to give it all away.
The clock is now ticking.
Marcus died Monday at his Boca Raton home. He was 95.
One of Georgia’s most prominent philanthropists and a major donor nationally, Marcus found that methodically giving away his vast fortune was immensely satisfying.
But it wasn’t easy — or quick. At least not in the hands-on way he liked to deal with nonprofits.
He worked at it full time for more than two decades after he retired from leading Home Depot. Before his health declined in the last year and a half, his habit was to arrive at his foundation’s office in Atlanta at 8:30 a.m. and stay until 6:30 p.m.
The Marcus Foundation says it has given away more than $2.7 billion since it was created 35 years ago. Now the foundation will be required to give away “significantly more” than that in a much shorter period of time, said Jay Kaiman, the foundation’s president.
“It can’t just be done writing checks, and it has to be done in an entrepreneurial way,” Kaiman said. “With business sense.”
Board members, of which Kaiman is one, “are going to have to work very hard and be very wise.”
Credit: NYT
Credit: NYT
Marcus was clear about his wishes and the challenges going forward, said Frank Blake, a former Home Depot chairman and chief executive officer who now serves as vice chairman of The Marcus Foundation’s board.
Marcus didn’t only wait for people to come to him with ideas asking for money. Sometimes he sought out people to address needs he saw in the world, pushing experts to create solutions.
“He would probe,” Blake said. “It was very much a dialogue. … Much of it was done with a vision that Bernie would have.”
In “Kick Up Some Dust,” a 2022 book that Marcus co-authored, he recounted what happened years ago when he and his wife learned they had become billionaires. He told Billi Marcus “‘We can buy anything we want — or we can change the world. What do you want to do?’ Quickly, Billi said, ‘Let’s do good things.’”
They created the foundation for that purpose, he wrote.
Foundation leaders reached this week declined, for now, to disclose how much money will flow to the foundation in the wake of Marcus’ death. Estimates of his overall wealth range widely, and Forbes put it at $10.3 billion. His foundation gave $170 million to about 200 charitable causes in 2022, the most recent annual report made public.
Credit: undefined
Credit: undefined
In an interview with The Atlanta Journal-Constitution five years ago, Marcus talked about his carefully devised plans for continued giving while he was alive and after his passing. “I’m very serious about my money. I don’t treat it frivolously.”
Most, he said, was in stock of Home Depot, the home-improvement retail chain he and Arthur Blank founded in Atlanta in the late 1970s.
“I’m 90. I don’t need anything else,” Marcus said. “I’ve got all the houses I need. I live very well. My kids are taken care of. Everything I live for now is finding the right things to put my money into that can give me a rate of return in emotion and doing good for this world.”
Some of the nation’s biggest and best known foundations essentially exist in perpetuity, making measured donations year after year but using investment gains to keep the money from running out. Marcus, instead, said he wanted his foundation to last only a limited time, hoping that would ensure it continued to target only the kinds of causes he cared about most.
Over time he focused on five broad charitable areas, which he has directed his foundation to stick with even after his death. They include medical treatment and research; Jewish causes; children and youth development; community support; and an area the foundation referred to as free enterprise, national security and veterans.
“Those are really the DNA of Bernie’s life,” Kaiman said.
Marcus’ giving to Jewish causes stemmed from his own faith, including what his mother taught him about the concept of tzedakah, or charitable giving.
He donated millions of dollars for Jewish teens in the U.S. to visit Israel. He grew concerned about a proposal that would have prevented some of his grandchildren from qualifying to settle in Israel — because their mother had converted to Judaism rather than being born into it. In digging into the issue, he wrote that he learned about problems with Israel’s system of government. So he helped form an Israel-based think tank, the Israel Democracy Institute, that he said would support democratic principles.
More recently, Marcus donated tens of millions of dollars to help develop an underground center in Israel to help shield the nation’s blood supplies from missiles and other attacks, as well as earthquakes.
Credit: Courtesy Marcus Jewish Community Center of Atlanta
Credit: Courtesy Marcus Jewish Community Center of Atlanta
Marcus’ focus on community support largely benefited Atlanta and Georgia, though he had no particular ties to the area before he and Blank choose it as the base for Home Depot’s launch and headquarters. Now, Home Depot is the biggest publicly traded company based in the state, measured by revenue.
Marcus built the Georgia Aquarium in downtown Atlanta as a thank you to the community and Home Depot employees, whom he credited with the wealth that made The Marcus Foundation possible.
His giving has benefited numerous Atlanta entities. They include universities (among them Georgia Tech, Emory, Georgia State and Kennesaw State); hospitals (Grady Health System, Piedmont Healthcare, Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta and the Shepherd Center); schools (such as KIPP Atlanta Schools, The Weber School and Tapestry Public Charter School); and camps (among them, Camp Twin Lakes).
Other local recipients include Jewish organizations (such as the Jewish Federation of Greater Atlanta and the Marcus Jewish Community Center); the Marcus Autism Center; Big Brothers Big Sisters of Metro Atlanta; and, years ago, an emergency response center for the Atlanta-based Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
He also focused on contributions in South Florida, where he also lived in recent decades, in addition to his homes in Atlanta and North Carolina.
Marcus’ background as the child of immigrants made him grateful for being able to grow up in the United States and capitalize on free enterprise, another broad area of his philanthropic giving. He donated regularly to efforts that he thought would support job creation. And he later expanded to a focus on military veterans, who he considered key to the nation’s survival.
He funded support for veterans and first responders with traumatic brain injuries, post-traumatic stress and substance abuse issues. In “Kick Up Some Dust,” Marcus wrote that his eldest brother and some other relatives who served in World War II “came home broken men” because of what was then called “shell shock.”
Credit: arvin.temkar@ajc.com
Credit: arvin.temkar@ajc.com
Marcus was drawn to philanthropy for medical research and treatment in other areas as well. Part of the draw was his own unfulfilled dreams of becoming a doctor.
His hopes of going to medical school had been blocked by steep fees imposed specifically on Jews to get such training, he wrote. He instead became a pharmacist, but he never lost his fascination with medicine. The Marcus Foundation has funded research, diagnosis and treatments for cancer, strokes and other cardiovascular disease (later in life he had heart valve issues), central nervous system diseases, sepsis and autism spectrum disorder.
Marcus’ focus on autism was sparked by a woman who worked for him who struggled getting help for her child. That led to the creation of what is now called the Marcus Autism Center in Atlanta and his backing of Autism Speaks, an advocacy and support organization for individuals with autism and their families.
Outside of his philanthropic giving, Marcus became one of the nation’s biggest political donors over the last decade, giving heavily to GOP causes and, particularly, efforts to elect Donald Trump as president of the United States.
Marcus, who said Trump wasn’t his top Republican choice to serve in the White House but was a vocal supporter, stressed that his philanthropic giving dwarfed his political outlays. From the 2016 to 2024 election cycles he gave more than $70 million in federal political contributions, according to data from OpenSecrets.
When Marcus made charitable contributions to nonprofits, the money came with expectations. Organizations were required to provide metrics showing whether they were making progress on meeting needs. He wrote in “Kick Up Some Dust” that each recipient had to create a business model for how to survive after the foundation’s funding ended.
He wrote, “As long as I still have a heartbeat, I will continue to focus on philanthropy, but I refuse to leave my business sense at the door.”
Credit: John Spink
Credit: John Spink
According to Kaiman, key nonprofits that the foundation supported while Marcus was alive will be high on the list of organizations considered for future funding. But he said that doesn’t mean the giving will be automatic. “On their own merits they are going to have come back and justify new things they are doing to have impact.”
In recent years, as Marcus aged into his 90s, it became clear that nonprofits were requesting sharply bigger donations with much longer payout windows, Kaiman said. “We both knew why: People were trying to get him to speed it up. … Obviously some people sincerely were worried about Bernie’s mortality.”
“But he didn’t pay attention to that,” Kaiman said. “I think he was very focused on doing it right.”
Marcus had often said that he hoped to live to 100, so he could enjoy giving away more of his money. But his decades-long focus on philanthropy carried a cost beyond dollars.
“I don’t have many regrets in my life, but one thing really bothers me: I was not around much for my children and grandchildren,” he wrote in “Kick Up Some Dust.”
“While at Home Depot, I worked all the time. When I retired, I did the same thing with my philanthropy. Maybe it’s because our family grew up poor, and I felt like I never had the luxury to slow down. Maybe it’s because I’ve worked for so long that I can’t imagine being without a job. Maybe it is because there is still so much to do.”
