Bernie Marcus, co-founder of The Home Depot, died at his Florida home Monday at the age of 95.
Marcus was the son of Russian-Jewish immigrants and embodied the American Dream. He rose from living in a tenement in New Jersey to riches through his business, a Home Depot press release states.
Marcus was worth some $6 billion at the time of his death. An official from the Jobs Creator Network, a nonprofit group set up by the billionaire for small businesses, said that he died from natural causes. Marcus was a Republican mega-donor and Trump supporter.
The Home Depot employs nearly 500,000 workers across thousands of stores throughout the United States. “The entire Home Depot family is deeply saddened by the death of our co-founder Bernie Marcus. He’s left us with an invaluable legacy and the backbone of our company: our values and our culture. He will be tremendously missed,” the company said in a statement on social media.
“He [Marcus] was a master merchant and a retail visionary. But even more importantly, he valued our associates, customers and communities above all,” a Home Depot spokesperson told the New York Post.
Marcus co-founded Home Depot after Handy Dan, a home improvement company, fired him at the age of 49. “Before Home Depot, it was all stores that if you wanted to buy electrical stuff, you went to an electrical store, you went to a hardware store, you went to a paint store. And we just took that and put that under one roof. Our concept took hold,” Marcus said in a video uploaded in his memory by the Jobs Creator Network.
In Memoriam: Bernie Marcus, 1929-2024, founder of JCN and co-founder of The Home Depot pic.twitter.com/8shtoCZYKe
— Job Creators Network (@JobCreatorsUSA) November 5, 2024
Marcus credited his success to capitalism and touted “the free market system” as the greatest engine of wealth creation in human history. “While some may say that socialism is well intentioned, the fact is it robs people of their independence, their dignity and their finances,” he said. Socialism in turn translates to “government dependence, suppression of ideas and lower standards of living.”
