Marcus, who died in November 2024 at age 95, enrolled in pharmacy school when his family couldn’t afford to send him to medical school. He would often skip classes to sell Amana freezers door-to-door, according to a memoir published by Home Depot, but he still received his degree from Rutgers University. 

After college, he worked his way up through various leadership positions at manufacturing companies, and had a career-defining moment in 1978 when he was fired from a now-defunct home improvement store called Handy Dan. That’s when he decided to reinvent himself and cofounded Home Depot. He was worth an estimated $11 billion when he died.

Marcus’ legacy lives on, and his philanthropic foundation now nods to one of his original passions: medicine.

The Marcus Foundation, established in 1989 by Bernie and his wife, Billi, donated $28.7 million to Dr. Chuck Murry, director of the University of Southern California’s Stem Cell Center, to advance clinical trials of stem cell-based therapies to regenerate damaged tissue after a heart attack. 

“Murry and his team have advanced gene-edited cellular therapy to the point that the time is right to support cells as living medicine in this new form of treatment,” Jonathan Simons, chief science officer of The Marcus Foundation, said in a statement. 

The gift is the largest The Marcus Foundation has given to USC and one of the largest it has given to academic medicine. In 2024, The Marcus Foundation donated $25.9 million for stroke research at Emory University School of Medicine and Grady Health System’s Marcus Stroke and Neuroscience Center, and in 2019 gave $20 million to establish a Department of Integrative Medicine and Nutritional Sciences at Jefferson’s Sidney Kimmel Medical College.

The Marcus Foundation’s dedication to medical research

The USC gift fits a decades-long pattern of giving for the Marcus Foundation. Since Bernie and Billi Marcus established the foundation in 1989, it has granted more than $2.7 billion through more than 3,500 grants, spanning medical research, Jewish causes, free enterprise, veterans, and children’s welfare.

Medicine, though, was always a main focus. The foundation calls itself a U.S. leader in biomedical research philanthropy, with a focus on five areas: stem cell research and regenerative medicine, earlier cancer detection and treatment, autism diagnosis and treatment, integrative medicine, and cardiovascular disease, including stroke. 

The foundation’s first grant, roughly $110,000, went to Emory’s Egleston Children’s Research. Marcus put up initial funding to launch Autism Speaks in 2005—and built the Marcus Stroke and Neuroscience Center at Grady, the Marcus Autism Center at Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta, and the Marcus Institute for Brain Health at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus, which treats veterans and retired athletes with traumatic brain injuries.

His giving has always been deliberate. 

“We decided to narrow the field to those things that I was really, truly interested in,” Marcus told Philanthropy Roundtable in 2012, describing his move away from what he called a “buckshot approach.”

“People may not understand how hard it is to do this,” said Mike Leven, a Marcus Foundation trustee. “People are coming at you all the time, good people with good causes. Unless you discipline yourself, you’re going to overgive and underachieve. Bernie’s better at it than anybody I know.”