Eli Broad

Origins and early life

Eli Broad was born in the Bronx, New York, on 6 June 1933, the son of Lithuanian Jewish immigrants, a house painter and a seamstress, and he grew up in Detroit. He graduated in accounting from Michigan State University in 1954 and became a certified public accountant before setting up on his own.

Work and career

In 1957, with Donald Kaufman, the husband of his wife's cousin, he co-founded the homebuilder Kaufman and Broad in Detroit, starting with two model homes in suburban Madison Heights; the company, now KB Home, became in 1969 the first homebuilder listed on the New York Stock Exchange. In 1971 it bought Sun Life Insurance Company of America, which Broad transformed into the retirement-savings group SunAmerica, merged into AIG in 1999.

The Jewish Telegraphic Agency remembered him as a Jewish philanthropist who gave to Jewish causes, from the Jewish Federation of Greater Los Angeles to the National Museum of American Jewish History in Philadelphia, which received a million dollars from him in 2007. With his wife Edythe he was founding chairman of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles in 1979, and their first gift of 100 million dollars created the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, announced in 2003 and launched in 2004 to bring genomics to medicine.

In 2010 the couple signed the Giving Pledge, and on 20 September 2015 they opened The Broad, a contemporary art museum with free general admission on Grand Avenue in downtown Los Angeles, home to more than 2,000 works. At Michigan State they endowed the business school that bears his name in 1991 and the Broad Art Museum, designed by Zaha Hadid and opened in 2012. He died at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles on 30 April 2021, aged 87, survived by his wife and their two sons.