Donald Trump’s victory last week got me thinking about a conversation I had with one of his closest friends — the late, great Bernie Marcus, the co-founder of Home Depot.
It was exactly a year ago to the day of his death. A frail but still fighting Bernie told me he was in a “particularly pissed-off mood.” Capitalism was under assault from the leftist forces of the Biden-Harris administration.
Marcus believed (on good evidence) that they were looking to dismantle what made this country great: the free market. Bernie was going to focus what was left of his energy on making sure they didn’t, including helping elect Trump president.
It was the last long-form interview Bernie did as his health continued to slip away. Last week, he died peacefully surrounded by family and friends knowing he lived a life worth living. He pulled himself out of poverty and fought the antisemitism of his day to become a billionaire and a major philanthropist.
He created one of the great American companies — the shining example that capitalism does, in fact, work for the average American.
He didn’t do it alone, of course, but with assistance from friends like his old pal Ken Langone. Long before the name “Langone” became synonymous with a world-class health system (full disclosure: I am a prostate cancer survivor because of the excellent care at the NYU Langone Medical Center), “Kenny,” as Bernie called him, was a Wall Street legend.
Bernie pulled himself out of a tenement to achieve the American dream; Ken was the son of a Long Island plumber who struggled to make ends meet. Like many ambitious men of the day, Ken looked to the big city to make his mark.
Cutting his teeth
After college, Langone cut his teeth at a backwater firm named R.W. Pressprich. The bigger, WASPy firms back in the early 1960s wanted nothing to do with a straight-talking, working-class Italian kid. (For the full story on Langone’s amazing life and career, pick up his great autobiography, “I Love Capitalism!: An American Story.”)
But Langone was a great stock analyst and banker. Let’s just say you couldn’t keep him down. He convinced another upstart, Ross Perot, to hire him as lead banker on the IPO of Perot’s burgeoning computer company, Electronic Data Systems. The frenzy around the deal cemented Perot’s status as a business leader and billionaire. It also cemented Langone’s status as one of the world’s great financiers.
Knowing all this, you can see how Bernie and Ken became friends, eventually business partners when Marcus hit a low point in his life. In a corporate shakeup, Bernie was fired as CEO of Handy Dan, a highly profitable, publicly traded chain of hardware stores. He soon turned to “Kenny” for advice.
“When Bernie came to see me he was shot . . . he told me he was nearly broke,” Langone said last week in an interview with The Post.
Langone remembered how Bernie often dreamed big on how to revolutionize the retailing of home goods — a new company that would provide one-stop shopping for tools, cement, paint, you name it. Langone was impressed.
“OK you got fired,” Langone recalls telling his pal. “But I think you got hit in the ass with the golden horseshoe.”
Langone used all his contacts on Wall Street to raise money for that dream. Home Depot started out small; it barely had any inventory. It’s now a $400 billion company employing nearly half a million people across the country.
One big reason, Langone tells me, is that Bernie wanted to spread the wealth to the average Home Depot worker through the free markets.
“We called our business model the ‘inverted triangle,’ ” Langone said. “In most businesses, the important people were at the top — the CEO and his people. Not us.”
Langone said Bernie was adamant that “we didn’t even have a headquarters,” convinced that it would create distance from employees at the outlets. People were paid a decent wage, and given the chance to be owners. Workers were given an opportunity to buy stock, including “kids who collected the shopping carts in the parking lot,” Langone tells me.
Rising to be millionaires
“I know of at least 3,000 of these employees, many of whom started out earning minimum wage, who became millionaires,” Langone said proudly during our chat.
Bernie, on his deathbed last Monday, was serenely confident that his other pal Donald Trump would be elected president in a few hours, and he played a role in it, a friend who was there says. A Trump victory would help expose the left’s lies about the foundations of our great nation, which includes their false claims about the evils of capitalism.
Yes, it’s a wonderful sight to see a massive Home Depot store, filled with shoppers and hardworking employees getting by, and knowing that the government didn’t build that. Instead, it was a poor kid from Newark and his pal, a plumber’s son from Roslyn, LI.
As “Kenny” would say, ya gotta love capitalism. And ya gotta love Bernie Marcus.
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