American billionaire and philanthropist Eli Broad, co-founder of real estate group Kaufman & Broad, dead at 87

Businessman, philanthropist and contemporary art collector Eli Broad, a residential real estate pioneer, died on Friday April 30 in Los Angeles. He was 87 years old. Suzi Emmerling, spokesperson for the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation, confirmed with the New York Times than the billionaire – his fortune is estimated at $ 6.9 billion, according to the magazine Forbes -, died of a long illness.

Founder of promoter Kaufman & Broad then head of financial services giant SunAmerica, Eli Broad had largely driven and funded the revival of downtown Los Angeles, where he opened in 2015 his own museum of contemporary art, the Broad, after to have supported the other cultural institutions of the city.

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Born in 1933 in New York, Eli Broad was still a young accountant from Detroit, in 1957, when he joined forces with developer Donald Kaufman to embark on the construction of single-family homes. The pair successfully surfed the boom of the 1960s, and Kaufman & Broad became one of the world’s leading residential real estate developers. In 1963, Eli Broad moved the business from Phoenix to Los Angeles, starting a long history with the city.

Full-time philanthropist

In the 1970s, he bought an insurance company to protect himself from the ups and downs of the real estate market. Over the years, he created a conglomerate of financial services dedicated to managing the retirement savings of baby boomers – the very people who once enriched him once by buying his homes. SunAmerica was sold to AIG in 1998 for $ 18 billion, and Eli Broad quickly retired from business, becoming a full-time philanthropist, notably in support of the arts, public schools and medical research.

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A public arts school, a building at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA), another at Caltech University… the billionaire leaves a lasting imprint in his adopted city, and especially in his museums. In the late 1970s, he was one of the founders of the Museum of Contemporary Arts (MOCA) built in Downtown and in 2008, he gave his name to a wing of the Los Angeles County Museum (Lacma).

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Seven years later, he opened his own institution, intended to house, among other things, works from his exceptional collection: 2,000 works by more than 200 artists, from Jean-Michel Basquiat to Jeff Koons, Takashi Murakami to Robert Rauschenberg or even Ed Ruscha, Cindy Sherman, Cy Twombly, Andy Warhol… The building is built opposite the MOCA and next to Frank Gehry’s Walt Disney Concert Hall – whose funding he supported -, on Grand Avenue, which has become, very largely thanks to him, the new cultural epicenter of Los Angeles.

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