I met Bernie Marcus, the nice entrepreneur, philanthropist and free-market evangelist, last week at his spacious home in Boca Raton Fla. — and in fact, he wasted no time letting me understand how he really feels.
“I’m in a very pissed-off mood,” Marcus told me as we sat down. “I’ve got lots on my mind. That is going to be some interview.”
I told him I expected nothing less.
Marcus is best often called one in all the founders of Home Depot, teaming up with financier Ken Langone and businessman Arthur Blank to create from scratch an organization that employs nearly a half-million people working in hundreds of stores across the country.
Yet the fundamentals of the Home Depot story don’t do justice to Marcus’ legacy. He’s a voluble billionaire and a proud conservative activist who grew up in a fourth-floor Newark, NJ, tenement apartment.
“We were poorer than you might imagine. And my ambition in those days was to make $25,000 a 12 months and handle my family.”
He did that and lot more. In Home Depot, Marcus created what’s now a $150 billion-a-year revenue business, plus tens of billions in wealth — and made just a few billion himself. He’s given many thousands and thousands of it away to charities and politicians he believes could make a difference in reversing the country’s devolution into near socialism.
Marcus retired from Home Depot in 2002 but that doesn’t mean he went off to some beach somewhere. He’s fighting the nice fight, writing checks to elect free-market types in state and federal government. A bit greater than a decade ago, he created a free-market advocacy group, the Job Creators Network, which lobbies on behalf of entrepreneurs and small businesses.
“Charlie, I’m 94 years old. Unfortunately, I actually have a 60-year-old brain, a 94-year-old body,” he said during our wide-ranging interview, obviously concerned that he doesn’t have much time left to fight this good fight. “I’ve said this to all of my friends, anybody who would listen: if this election goes the best way the last one went, this country might be a Third World country.”
![Marcus in 1998.](https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/11/NYPICHPDPICT000008066900.jpg?w=1024)
Biden a ‘dunce’
He blames much of America’s woes on President Biden, who beat Bernie’s friend Donald Trump within the 2020 election and can likely face Trump in 2024. He calls Biden a “dunce” and says he’s the “most divisive president we’ve ever seen.” Labeling nearly half the country as knuckle-dragging MAGA Republicans wasn’t a wise technique to heal the country, a goal Biden claimed was a priority.
Possibly worse, Marcus says, is Biden’s lack of mental acuity (“anyone is feeding him like a puppet”), unforced spending and policy errors which have led to inflation and an explosion in federal debt.
As bad as Biden has been, Marcus says he also has misgivings about Trump. “Wages were up. Minorities were working. Inflation was down” through the Trump presidency, Marcus said. “But he can’t keep his mouth shut.” Good point. I bring up Trump’s noxious Twitter feed and his role within the Jan. 6 Capitol Hill riots, whether he should step aside giving Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis or ex-South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, each successful politicians, a shot.
![Home Depot store](https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/11/NYPICHPDPICT000071663144.jpg?w=1024)
As bad as Biden has been, Marcus says he also has misgivings about Trump. “Wages were up. Minorities were working. Inflation was down” through the Trump presidency, he said. “But he can’t keep his mouth shut . . . I’m afraid if he’s elected, the very first thing he does is go after his enemies, starting with the Republicans.”
Good points. I bring up Trump’s noxious Twitter feed and his role within the Jan. 6 Capitol Hill riots, whether he should step aside giving Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis or ex-South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, each successful politicians, a shot.
“I’m combating it now,” Marcus said, “I believe [Trump] has the policies if he would just follow the script and do what he has to do.”
Marcus brings me back to his story as he describes why, for all its problems, America is price fighting for. In 1978, Marcus had just gotten fired as CEO of a hardware-store chain often called Handy Dan. Unsure what to do, he was talking about his future with Langone, the straight-talking financier.
Langone advised (in a really Langonean way) that Marcus pursue that entrepreneurial enterprise he had been mulling — something called Home Depot. “Kenny said, ‘You simply got hit within the ass with a golden horseshoe,’ ” and offered to “put together investors and put me in business.”
Home Depot was born and has grown right into a $300 billion market-value company.
Handy Dan closed its doors greater than 30 years ago.
Could Marcus create Home Depot today? It wasn’t easy then; it might be nearly unimaginable now, he said. “Regulations and all this woke crap” has made starting a public company nearly unimaginable. You’ve to satisfy not only shareholders, but “stakeholders” and asset managers who force CEOs to embrace woke management metrics like ESG.
“I ran a business for 60 years,” Marcus said. “I might never get entangled with a social issue outside of business. That was not my business.”
However the American public is popping against left-wing economic policies. They hate Biden’s inflation and hate corporate wokeness, which offers Marcus some hope for the longer term. He cited the travails of Budweiser that used trans influencer Dylan Mulvaney in a beer ad, no less.
“They were No. 1 . . . and so they turned silly overnight,” he said. “The American people remember; their sales are going to remain down.”
And the American people, he says, are price saving from what he believes is a really possible progressive apocalypse. “It’s why at 94 I’m spending a variety of my money attempting to be sure that we bring the best faces in front of” them.
Don’t stop, Bernie, don’t stop.