ELI BROAD

Broad was born in 1933 in New York to Lithuanian Jewish immigrant parents and grew up in Detroit. He graduated from Michigan State University in accounting in 1954.

He and his business partner Donald Kaufman started Kaufman and Broad Building Company in Detroit in 1957 with $25,000 — building homes for first-time buyers with no money down at a time when that was unusual. The company went public in 1961.

Broad eventually took it to Los Angeles, renamed it KB Home, and turned it into one of the country's largest homebuilders. In 1971, he acquired Sun Life Insurance Company of America and began building what would become SunAmerica Inc., a retirement savings and financial services company.

SunAmerica went public in 1989. In 1999, AIG acquired SunAmerica for approximately $18 billion in stock — one of the largest insurance acquisitions in history.

That deal made Broad definitively, permanently wealthy. He retired from active business and began his third act: collecting art and reforming American public education.

Kaufman and Broad (later KB Home) was founded in 1957 with $25,000 and grew into one of the largest homebuilders in the US. Broad took it public in 1961 and expanded it nationally before separating it from his insurance business.

SunAmerica Inc. started as a small insurance company acquisition in 1971 and became a major retirement savings provider before AIG bought it in 1999 for $18 billion.

The Broad Foundation and the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation have deployed hundreds of millions into urban public school reform, scientific research including the Broad Institute (a joint Harvard-MIT biomedical research center), and arts — including the Broad Museum in Los Angeles, which opened in 2015 as a free public contemporary art museum.

Broad was a builder, not a portfolio investor. His approach was to identify large, fragmented markets with structural demand — starter homes for young families, retirement savings for baby boomers — and build scalable businesses to serve them.

He did not diversify across asset classes. He picked one thing, built it for decades, sold at the right moment, and moved on.

His philanthropy follows the same logic: identify a big systemic problem, back a specific solution, and push it hard. He is not known for hedging.

The AIG sale of SunAmerica in 1999 for approximately $18 billion was the financial event of Broad's life. He started Sun Life Insurance Company of America with a small acquisition in 1971 and spent 28 years building it into a retirement savings powerhouse.

The timing was nearly perfect — the deal closed months before the dot-com bubble burst, the AIG stock he received was worth a fortune, and he walked away with a payout that put him permanently in the billionaire stratosphere. Few people have correctly identified two secular trends — the homeownership wave of the 1960s-70s and the retirement savings wave of the 1980s-90s — and built a dominant company in each.

Broad's aggressive push into charter school expansion and standardized testing drew enormous backlash and, critics argue, produced mixed results at best. He spent over $600 million on education reform over two decades, much of it backing charter schools and data-driven accountability.

The Broad Superintendents Academy, which trained urban school administrators in a business management style, was widely criticized by educators as tone-deaf to classroom realities. Several Los Angeles Unified School District initiatives he backed became political firestorms.

The honest verdict is that his philanthropic education spending did not produce the revolution in student outcomes he expected, and the adversarial relationships he built with teachers' unions made sustainable change harder.

Broad believed in identifying structural demand trends and building businesses to serve them before the competition showed up. He had a strong conviction that first-mover advantage in fragmented markets was the most durable competitive position.

In philanthropy, he believed in being directive — not just writing checks but pushing specific solutions and measuring outcomes. He was criticized for being too controlling with his philanthropic dollars.

His response was essentially: if you want passive money, go find it elsewhere.

Broad met his wife Edythe (Eddie) at Michigan State University. They married in 1954 and remained partners for nearly 70 years — she is co-named in the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation.

They have two sons, Jeffrey and Gary. Eddie Broad was an active partner in his philanthropy and art collection.

Broad died on April 30, 2021, in Los Angeles at age 87. His wife and sons continue the foundation's work.

Broad graduated from Michigan State University in 1954 with a degree in accounting. He was the first in his family to attend college.

He became a CPA but later said the accounting background was the most useful thing he ever studied — it taught him to read financial statements, which gave him an edge when evaluating acquisitions throughout his career.

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