Eli Broad

Eli Broad is a renowned business leader who built two Fortune 500  companies from the ground up over a five-decade career in business.  He is the founder of both SunAmerica Inc. and KB Home (formerly  Kaufman and Broad Home Corporation).  

Today, Eli Broad and his wife, Edythe, are devoted to philanthropy  as founders of The Broad Foundations, which they established to  advance entrepreneurship for the public good in education, science  and the arts. The Broad Foundations, which include The Eli and  Edythe Broad Foundation and The Broad Art Foundation, have  assets of $2.1 billion. 

The primary work of The Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation is to  dramatically improve urban K-12 public education through better  governance, management, labor relations and competition. The  Broad Foundation’s major education initiatives include the $2  million Broad Prize for Urban Education, awarded annually to urban  school districts that have made the greatest overall performance and  improvement in student achievement; The Broad Superintendents  Academy, a 10-month executive management training program to  prepare working CEOs and other top executives from business, nonprofit,  military, government and education backgrounds to lead  urban public education; The Broad Residency in Urban Education, a  two-year management development program that trains recent  business and law school graduates who have several years of work  experience and places them immediately into managerial positions in  the central operations of urban school districts; and The Broad  Institute for School Boards, a national training and support program  for urban school district governance teams of school board members  and superintendents.  

The Broad Foundation also invests in advancing innovative scientific  and medical research in the areas of human genomics, stem cell  research and inflammatory bowel disease. In an unprecedented  partnership with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard  University and the Whitehead Institute, the Broads in 2003  announced a $100 million founding gift to create The Eli and Edythe  Broad Institute for biomedical research. The Institute’s aim is to  realize the promise of the human genome to revolutionize clinical  medicine and to make knowledge freely available to scientists  around the world. They gave a second $100 million gift to The  Broad Institute in 2005, and in 2008, they gave an additional $400  million to make the world’s leading genomics institute permanent. 

Over the past four decades, the Broads have built two of the most  prominent collections of postwar and contemporary art worldwide:  The Eli and Edythe L. Broad Collection and The Broad Art  Foundation. The two collections together include approximately  2,000 works by more than 150 artists. Since 1984, The Broad Art  Foundation has operated an active “lending library” of its extensive  collection. Dedicated to increasing access to contemporary art for  audiences worldwide, The Broad Art Foundation has made more  than 7,000 loans of artwork to over 450 museums and university  galleries worldwide.  

Mr. Broad was the founding chairman and is a life trustee of The  Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, and he is currently a  trustee of The Museum of Modern Art in New York. Mr. Broad is a  life trustee of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, where the  Broads gave a $60 million gift to build the Renzo Piano-designed  Broad Contemporary Art Museum, which opened in February 2008,  and to fund an art acquisition budget .  

Tireless advocates of Los Angeles, the Broads have championed the  cultural and architectural vitality of the city. Committed to the belief  that all great cities need a vibrant center, Mr. Broad was the  visionary behind the development of Grand Avenue in downtown  Los Angeles, which will blend residential, retail, cultural and  recreational uses into a civic centerpiece to rival the main boulevards  of the world’s greatest cities. In 1996, Mr. Broad and then-Mayor  Richard Riordan spearheaded the fundraising campaign to build the  Frank Gehry-designed Walt Disney Concert Hall, which opened to  worldwide acclaim in October 2003. The Broads have provided the  lead gift to the Los Angeles Opera to bring Richard Wagner’s fouropera  cycle Der Ring des Nibelungen to Los Angeles in 2009—  2010. They gave $10 million in 2008 to create an endowment for  programming and arts education at The Eli and Edythe Broad Stage  and The Edye Second Space at the Santa Monica College performing  arts center.  

From 2004 to 2009, Mr. Broad served as a Regent of the  Smithsonian Institution by appointment of the U.S. Congress and the  President. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and  Sciences and in 1994 was named Chevalier in the National Order of  the Legion of Honor by the Republic of France. In fall 2007, Mr.  Broad received the Carnegie Medal of Philanthropy. He received the  David Rockefeller Award from the Museum of Modern Art in March  2009.  

Strong believers in higher education, the Broads have further  extended their philanthropy to a number of universities across the  country. The Broad Foundation made a major contribution to the  School of the Arts and Architecture at UCLA for The Eli and Edythe  Broad Art Center. Mr. Broad is a life trustee at Caltech, where the  Broads created the Broad Fellows Program in Brain Circuitry and  gave the cornerstone gift to create the Broad Center for the  Biological Sciences. In 2006, the Keck School of Medicine at the  University of Southern California announced the creation of the Eli  and Edythe Broad CIRM Center for Regenerative Medicine and  Stem Cell Research. In 2007, the Broads announced a major gift to  UCLA for the Eli and Edythe Broad Center of Regenerative  Medicine and Stem Cell Research. In 2008, the Broads gave a major  gift to the University of California, San Francisco for the new  headquarters of the Eli and Edythe Broad Center of Regeneration  Medicine and Stem Cell Research. Mr. Broad has also served as  chairman of the board of trustees of Pitzer College and vice  chairman of the board of trustees of the California State University  system.  

In 1991, the Broads endowed The Eli Broad College of Business and  The Eli Broad Graduate School of Management at Michigan State  University (MSU), where Mr. Broad graduated cum laude in 1954.  In June 2007, the Broads announced a $26 million gift to create the  Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum at MSU.   

The Broads reside in Los Angeles and have two grown sons.