Retired billionaire investor Eli Broad and his wife, Edythe, announced a $25-million grant to Michigan State University's business school on Friday. The couple has given a total of nearly $100 million to the university, which Broad graduated from in 1954.
The latest donation, to the Eli Broad College of Business, is a challenge grant that the school will use to drum up another $80 million for its graduate programs. The funds will help finance scholarships, a new building to house graduate programs, and recruitment of speakers and "executives in residence."
Renowned philanthropists, the Broads have given $3.9 billion – more than half of their current net worth – to charity. Last year, they gave $100 million to the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT, a biomedical research institute they founded a decade ago. They've given the Broad Institute some $700 million overall. Their two foundations have a combined $2.1 billion in assets; the main causes they support are education, science and the arts.
In 1991, the Eli Broad College of Business and the Eli Broad Graduate School of Management were renamed in Broad's honor after he committed $20 million — at the time, the largest gift ever to a public business school.
The son of Lithuanian immigrants, Broad studied accounting at MSU. He co-founded Kaufman & Broad, which became one of the country's biggest home builders, and later sold Sun Life Insurance (later SunAmerica) to AIG for $18 billion.
Forbes estimates that his fortune is worth $7.2 billion. He ranked 66th on the 2014 Forbes 400 list of richest Americans.
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