David Koch
American industrialist who bankrolled Right-wing causes but clashed with Trump over free trade
DAVID KOCH, who has died aged 79, was an American industrial billionaire who deployed his fortune in support of a range of Right-wing causes and political candidates, and once stood as Libertarian candidate for vice president.
David and his older brother Charles Koch were each estimated recently by Forbes magazine to be worth $42.5 billion as the principal shareholders of Koch Industries, which is the second largest privately owned business in the US after the commodity group Cargill.
Founded in 1940 in Wichita, Kansas, by their hard-driving father Fred Koch – who had developed a new technique for extracting petroleum from crude oil – the modern-day Koch company is involved in chemicals, fertilisers, paper manufacturing and ranching as well as all aspects of the oil business, and employs 120,000 people.
David Koch was a social liberal who supported abortion and gay marriage, but the beliefs that mattered most to him were in the field of economics: small government, minimal welfare, low taxes and free trade.
He gave hundreds of millions of dollars to organisations that promoted those themes, ranging from the Citizens for a Sound Economy lobby group which he founded in 1984 to influential Washington think tanks such as the Cato Institute.
In the 1980 presidential election, Koch ran for vice president alongside the Libertarian presidential candidate Ed Clark, on a manifesto which promised to abolish social security, minimum wages, corporate taxes and agricultural subsidies as well as the Federal Reserve and many other government agencies.
Funded by Koch himself, the
pair won one per cent of the nationwide vote. But thereafter Koch withdrew from direct involvement in politics – “a nasty, corrupting business,” he said at the time – preferring to back Republican candidates who subscribed to his philosophies and fund campaigns against politicians who did not: notably, in later years, Barack Obama, whom he regarded as a “hardcore socialist”.
Relations with Donald Trump were less straightforward. During the 2016 presidential campaign, the Kochs did not donate to Trump’s campaign, focusing instead on favoured Senate and House candidates. But the powerful Americans for Prosperity group, which they founded, spent heavily to bring out Republican voters in key states such as Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan.
Last year the brothers – ardent free-traders – launched a campaign against Trump’s “America First” policy of trade tariffs against China, Mexico and Canada, earning a riposte from the President that “the globalist Koch brothers … have become a total joke in real Republican circles”.
Nevertheless some commentators claim that the Kochs’ ruthless financial influence laid the ground for the rise of Trump in a more general sense and that their role in coordinating a wider group of donors with similar views has become a corrosive force in American politics.
The rise of the Tea Party wing of Republicanism was in part attributed to Koch money, and in more recent times detractors blame them for undermining any serious US political action to address the issue of climate change.
Koch Industries is itself one of America’s biggest polluters: one report in 2011 accused its refineries and factories of emitting carbon dioxide equivalent to five million cars. The Kochs have funded research by climate-change sceptic scientists and campaigns against emissions legislation; according to Rolling Stone magazine, they have even conducted a “dirty war” against the large-scale development of solar power.
One scientist at Massachusetts Institute of Technology – where Koch is an alumnus, and has been publicly esteemed as a major benefactor – said recently that “few humans have done so much to dismantle the public’s trust in science and to undermine political action on the climate crisis”.
David Hamilton Koch was born on May 3 1940 in Wichita, Kansas, the son of Fred Chase Koch – whose father was a Dutch immigrant – and his wife Mary, née Robinson. David was educated at Deerfield Academy and MIT, where he took a master’s degree in chemical engineering and (standing 6ft 5in tall) captained the basketball team, personally scoring a record 41 points in a game against Middlebury College in 1962.
After a spell in engineering consultancy he joined Koch Industries in 1970 to work under his brother Charles (born 1935), who had taken over from their father in 1966. David became president of the engineering division and executive vice president of the group until failing health forced his retirement last year.
Their oldest brother Frederick and David’s twin Bill also inherited shares in the business, but were bought out after a bitter legal battle; David and Charles latterly owned 42 per cent of the company each.
Though better known for his political donations, Koch was also a philanthropist on a colossal scale, having been prompted in that direction by two traumatic episodes: the experience of surviving an aircraft collision on the runway of Los Angeles International Airport in 1991, and a diagnosis the next year of prostate cancer, which he would fight for the rest of his life. “I felt the good Lord was sitting on my shoulder,” he said after crawling from the plane wreckage, in which 34 people (including all the other first-class passengers) died.
Much of the $700 million he subsequently gave to medical institutions, including MIT and the Memorial Sloane Kettering and Presbyterian hospitals in New York, was for cancer research. In the arts – in which he inherited an enthusiasm from his mother – he gave $65 million to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, $100 million each for the renovation of the New York State Theater at Lincoln Center and to the New York City Opera and Ballet (of which he reportedly said, “I could afford it … And of course, there are beautiful girls”) and $35 million to the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History.
In his younger days, David Koch had the reputation of a playboy socialite, famed for his “penthouse parties”. He was in his mid-fifties when he married Julia Flesher, more than 20 years his junior, in 1996; they kept homes in New York, Long Island, Aspen and Palm Beach and a yacht in the Mediterranean. Julia survives him with their two sons and a daughter.
David Koch, born May 3 1940, died August 23 2019