Joined: Sat Sep 14, 2024 12:36 pm
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Apparently Trump had a mentor. He died. Unfortunately the day before Election Day. He called Biden a dunce. https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrum ... 7538426804https://nypost.com/2024/11/05/business/ ... ead-at-95/****************************** 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 late Monday at his home in Boca Raton, Fla. He was 95.
Marcus’ death was confirmed by an official at his nonprofit group, the Job Creators 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.
“The entire Home Depot family is deeply saddened by the death of our co-founder Bernie Marcus,” a Home Depot spokesperson told The Post. “He was a master merchant and a retail visionary. But even more importantly, he valued our associates, customers and communities above all.”
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 — an 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.
Trump paid tribute to the “legendary entrepreneur” while waiting for the election results in a post on his social media platform Truth Social.
“He supported me from the beginning and was always there when I needed help or advice,” Trump wrote.
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 November: “Charlie, I’m 94 years old. Unfortunately, I have a 60-year-old brain, a 94-year-old body.”
Bernard Marcus was born May 12, 1929, in Newark NJ, one of four children. Both parents immigrated from Russia just before the onset of the Great Depression. Despite his modest upbringing, he had aspirations to be a doctor.
He was accepted at Harvard Medical School but couldn’t afford to attend, he would later say, because an extra tuition fee was placed on the applications of Jewish students. .
He settled on pre-med/pharmacy degree from Rutgers but fell in love with retailing. While in college, Marcus discovered he was an amazing salesman and could connect with people. It was a skill he honed while working his summers as a standup comic in the Borscht Belt.
Those skills brought him success at a series of jobs and finally to a publicly traded hardware store chain named Handy Dan, where he became CEO. His life then took a dramatic turn in 1978 when he and his No 2, Arthur Blank, were on the losing end of an internal power struggle and ousted from their positions. At 49, Marcus was unemployed for the first time in his adult life.
Marcus described his firing as a low point for him, but it turned into a blessing. He had been dreaming of something revolutionary — a hardware store of all hardware stores. Instead of buying your tools in one place and cement at another, he wanted to create a one-stop shopping experience for home improvement.
He discussed his concept with his friend, the financier Ken Langone, a banker who years earlier made a name for himself bringing public Ross Perot’s Electronic Data Systems, which would eventually make Perot a billionaire and one to the biggest names in Corporate America.
After his firing, Marcus sheepishly asked Langone — a voluble New Yorker who came from hard-scrambled roots as well — if he knew of any job openings.
Bernie relayed the conversation to me this way: “Kenny said, ‘You just got hit in the ass with a golden horseshoe,’ ”
Langone offered to “put together investors and put me in business.”
Home Depot was born and has grown into a $390 billion market-value company.
Handy Dan closed its doors more than 30 years ago.
Marcus, Blank and Langone shared the title of Home Depot co-founders. All became billionaires in the process and philanthropists, giving away to various charities more money than they made.
Marcus retired from Home Depot in 2002 and his life took another turn. He believed in the free-market system and that small businesses were the foundation of the great American economy.
It’s then when he became a political activist donating to causes and politicians who shared his vision that capitalism has created more wealth than any economic system ever. And it was under attack by big government and increasingly leftists who controlled the Democratic Party
He launched the Job Creators Network 13 years ago to lobby on behalf of small businesses, because as he put it to me it would be nearly impossible to start a company like Home Depot today; regulations, taxes, the burdens of big government have become nearly insurmountable roadblocks for the modern entrepreneur.
For years, Bernie was a mainstay on cable TV evangelizing about the need to preserve free-market capitalism.
It’s how I got to know him, and full disclosure, greatly admire him as well. When I interviewed Bernie last year, he was resigned to the fact that his time on earth was short; he had to cram in a lot of work in a short period of time.
“It’s why at 94 I’m spending a lot of my money trying to make sure we bring the right faces in front of them,” he told me.
A couple of weeks ago I heard Bernie’s health took a turn for the worst. He was looking to hang on until the election because he believed some much is at stake. He and Donald Trump are close friends. He supported Trump in this year’s presidential race, though not without his misgivings about Trump’s temperament.
Those misgivings, however, paled in comparison to what he was witnessing from the Democratic Party, and the administration of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris in particular. Last year, he called Biden a “dunce” and “most divisive president we’ve ever seen.” Biden’s labeling of Trump supporters as “garbage” proved his point.
More than that, Bernie was horrified by the far-left lurch of the country during the Biden years, the vapidness of his VP, the current Democratic nominee; the economic policies that increased economic disparity between the rich and poor because of needless spending that stoked inflation. The administrative state that crushed entrepreneurial pursuits; the rampant antisemitism that sullied elite universities that Biden and Harris ignored.
He donated money to Trump, but wished he had the strength to campaign for him, and was trying to hold on until the election was over to see the end of the Biden-Harris disaster. He didn’t of course, but I am told he passed last night peacefully with family and friends, secured in his belief that he made a difference in this election and much more.
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