David Koch

Koch was born May 3, 1940, in Wichita, Kansas, the third of four sons of Fred Koch, a chemical engineer who had built a refining business partly by working in Stalin's Soviet Union before turning fiercely anti-communist at home. David and his twin brother, Bill, grew up wealthy and competitive, sent to Deerfield Academy and then MIT, where David earned two degrees in chemical engineering and set a single-game basketball scoring record that stood for decades. He joined Koch Industries in 1970 under his older brother Charles, opened the company's New York office, and by 1983 had bought out his brothers Bill and Frederick's shares alongside Charles in a 1.1 billion dollar settlement that split the family into feuding camps for years afterward.

In 1980 Koch ran for vice president on the Libertarian ticket, bankrolling a platform calling for abolishing Social Security, the Federal Reserve, and federal agencies from the EPA to the FBI; the ticket took about 1% of the vote, and Koch broke with the party in 1984 as too extreme even for him. He spent the following decades inside the Republican coalition instead, building Americans for Prosperity and a donor network that put more than 100 million dollars behind opposing Barack Obama's re-election in 2012 alone, while funding think tanks that questioned the scientific consensus on climate change. He gave away more than 1.3 billion dollars in his lifetime, most of it to cancer research and the arts, enough that his name sits on a Lincoln Center theater, an MIT cancer institute, and wings of three New York hospitals.

Koch's philanthropy and his politics ran in the same direction and in opposite ones at once. He gave tens of millions to cancer centers at MIT, Sloan Kettering and Johns Hopkins after surviving a 1991 plane collision on a Los Angeles runway and a 1992 prostate cancer diagnosis doctors did not expect him to survive long, and he was a social liberal within his party, backing abortion rights, gay rights and stem-cell research. His money also funded a network that helped block climate and health-care legislation his own scientific and medical grantees would likely have supported. Supporters credit that network with reviving limited-government politics in the Tea Party era; critics call it the most effective instrument for delaying U.S. climate policy private money ever built. The spending is documented; its effects are still argued on both sides.

Koch died of complications from prostate cancer at his Southampton, New York, home on August 23, 2019, at 79, six years after Charles bought his remaining operational stake in Koch Industries. Charles rebranded the political network the brothers built as Stand Together within a year of David's death, distancing it from some of the more combative branding of the Americans for Prosperity era even as it kept funding the same broad causes. The buildings that carry his name, the Koch Theater at Lincoln Center, the Koch Institute at MIT, the Koch Center for Cancer Care at Sloan Kettering, have outlasted the argument over how that money was raised.

David Koch's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Americans for Prosperity Foundation other
  Founding chairman; became a central vehicle of conservative political organizing 2004
• David H. Koch Theater, Lincoln Center building
  100 million dollar gift renamed the New York State Theater 2008
• David H. Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research, MIT building
  100 million dollar gift; more than 185 million to MIT in total 2007
• David H. Koch Center for Cancer Care, Memorial Sloan Kettering building
  150 million dollar gift 2015

• May 3, 1940 aged 0 Born in Wichita, Kansas
• 1970 aged ~30 Joins Koch Industries under his brother Charles
• 1980 aged ~40 Runs for vice president on the Libertarian ticket
• 1983 aged ~43 Buys out his brothers' shares in Koch Industries for 1.1 billion dollars
• February 1, 1991 aged 50 Survives a runway collision aboard USAir Flight 1493 in Los Angeles
• 1992 aged ~52 Diagnosed with prostate cancer
• 2008 aged ~68 Gives 100 million dollars to renovate the New York State Theater at Lincoln Center
• 2012 aged ~72 Koch network spends more than 100 million dollars opposing Obama's re-election
• August 23, 2019 aged 79 Dies at his home in Southampton, New York, at 79

• Charles Koch b. 1935
  Industrialist and political donor who built Koch Industries into one of America's largest private companies. brother and business partner
• Barack Obama b. 1961
  44th President and first African American to hold the office, known for the Affordable Care Act. opposed politically
• Al Gore b. 1948
  Vice president and 2000 presidential candidate who became a leading advocate for climate policy. opposed on climate policy
• Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis 1929–1994
  First Lady who restored the White House as a museum and shaped the public memory of her husband's presidency. bought her Fifth Avenue apartment