Eli Broad

Eli Broad was born June 6, 1933, in the Bronx to Lithuanian Jewish immigrant parents who moved the family to Detroit when he was six. He worked his way through Michigan State University as an accounting major, graduated in 1954, and became the state's youngest certified public accountant, a record that stood for over five decades. At twenty-one he married eighteen-year-old Edythe Lawson, and two years later, in 1956, he and a partner named Donald Kaufman put in 25,000 dollars between them to start a homebuilding company selling small, no-frills tract houses without basements, cheap enough that a young family could afford one on a single income. Broad ran the sales and finance side; Kaufman ran construction.

Kaufman and Broad went public in 1961, moved to Los Angeles in 1963, and by 1969 was the first homebuilder listed on the New York Stock Exchange, a company later renamed KB Home. Broad stepped down as CEO in 1974, bought a struggling life insurer for a fraction of its book value, and rebuilt it as SunAmerica, an annuities company he sold to AIG in 1998 for 17.8 billion dollars. He then devoted the rest of his life and roughly 4 billion dollars to three causes: charter-school growth and leadership training through the Broad Foundation, genomic medicine through the Broad Institute he founded with MIT and Harvard in 2003, and contemporary art, funding LACMA's Broad wing and finally his own free museum, The Broad, which opened in downtown Los Angeles in 2015 holding his and Edythe's 2,000-piece collection.

Broad treated philanthropy the way he had treated homebuilding, as a business to be run for measurable output, and education reform is where that habit made him the most enemies. His foundation funded prizes for districts that raised test scores, backed the national expansion of charter schools, and in 2015 was caught, through a leaked internal document, planning to convert half of Los Angeles's public school students to charter schools within eight years, a plan that outraged unions and school boards who had assumed his money came without an agenda. Supporters credited him with forcing a complacent public system to compete; critics called it a billionaire buying policy outcomes no one had elected him to set, a dispute over Broad's real legacy that was still unresolved when he died.

Broad died April 30, 2021, at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles after a long illness, at 87. The Broad museum, built to hold a collection he insisted stay in public reach rather than pass into private hands, now draws more visitors annually than any contemporary art museum built in Los Angeles in the last quarter century. His education philanthropy proved the more contested inheritance: the leadership-training program he founded has been absorbed and reshaped since his death, while the charter-school expansion he funded remains a live fight in California school politics rather than a settled achievement.

Eli Broad's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Kaufman and Broad (later KB Home) company
  Co-founded with Donald Kaufman; the first homebuilder listed on the NYSE 1956
• SunAmerica company
  Rebuilt from a failing life insurer; sold to AIG in 1998 1971
• Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard company
  Genomic-medicine research institute, founded with a 100 million dollar gift 2003
• The Broad building
  Free contemporary art museum in downtown Los Angeles holding the Broad collection 2015

• June 6, 1933 aged 0 Born in the Bronx, New York
• 1954 aged ~21 Graduates Michigan State and marries Edythe Lawson
• 1956 aged ~23 Co-founds Kaufman and Broad
• 1969 aged ~36 KB Home becomes the first homebuilder on the New York Stock Exchange
• 1998 aged ~65 Sells SunAmerica to AIG for 17.8 billion dollars
• 2003 aged ~70 Founds the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard
• September 20, 2015 aged 82 Opens The Broad museum in downtown Los Angeles
• April 30, 2021 aged 87 Dies in Los Angeles

• Bill Gates b. 1955
  Co-founder of Microsoft who, through the Gates Foundation, has donated billions to global health and education. fellow Giving Pledge signer
• Warren Buffett b. 1930
  Value investor whose disciplined approach built one of the largest personal fortunes in American history. fellow Giving Pledge signer
• Andrew Carnegie 1835–1919
  Steel magnate who built one of the largest steel empires in history and later became a major philanthropist. predecessor in large-scale American philanthropy