Fun facts

·         David Koch (pronounced ‘coke’) is now New York’s richest man, passing Mayor Bloomberg, and the fifth richest man in America, as he and his brother Charles each gained $5.5 billion of wealth over the past year to bring their total to $21.5 billion each.[i] 

·         His primary residence is a 9,000 square foot duplex in a luxury apartment building at 740 Park Avenue. Previously he spent eleven years in the Fifth Avenue apartment that had previously belonged to Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis but he sold it in 2006 for $32 million, having found it too small.[ii] He also owns homes in Aspen, Southampton, and Palm Beach. In addition to this he spends several weeks per year floating around the Mediterranean on a 246-foot mega-yacht called the Leander, which costs up to $500,000 per week. Koch has a personal chef and he and his family are driven around town in a chauffeured Mercedes.

·         Americans for Prosperity, the conservative non-profit founded by Koch, put at least $45 million dollars into the 2010 midterm elections, giving more money to House candidates than any other organization and to many rightwing Senate campaigns throughout the country. Overall conservative donations doubled liberal donations in the midterm elections.[iii]

·         The New York State Theater, home of the New York City Opera and the New York City Ballet, was renamed the David H. Koch Theater in the fall of 2008 after his $100 million donation.

·         In 2008 Koch’s young wife Julia, a former fashion assistant 23 years younger than Koch, debuted on Vanity Fair’s international best-dressed list.

·         From 1998 to 2008, Koch-controlled foundations gave out $196 million, much of it to conservative causes and institutions. This does not include $50 million in Koch Industries lobbying or $4 million in campaign contributions.

·         Koch Industries has lead all other energy companies in political contributions every year since 2006[iv] and has spent more money on congressional lobbyists than any other energy company since 1989.[v]

·         Koch Industries has been labeled the tenth largest air polluter in the United States in a report listed in March 2010.[vi]

·         Koch Industries and the Koch family are the largest funders of climate science denying organizations in the world, spending nearly $50 million dollars.[vii]

·         Koch is pro-global warming, whether it is caused by humans or not, claiming it would allow the earth to feed more people.[viii]

·         “You might ask: How does David Koch happen to have the wealth to be so generous? Well, let me tell you a story. It all started when I was a little boy. One day, my father gave me an apple. I soon sold it for five dollars and bought two apples and sold them for ten. Then I bought four apples and sold them for twenty. Well, this went on day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year, until my father died and left me three hundred million dollars!” – David Koch at a speech at Deerfield Academy, Massachusetts in 2003.[ix]

·         David Koch has personal reasons for supporting the Food Allergy Initiative since his oldest son, David Jr., is allergic to nuts, milk, egg, and shellfish, as well as horses, most dogs and cats. He learned he was allergic to horses when he caught whiff of one at a polo match when he was five.[x] (He has two other children with Julia: Julia and Mark.)

Bio

David H. Koch is an American oil and gas billionaire, currently considered by Forbes to be the richest man in New York and the fifth richest American, together with his brother Charles G. Koch, four years his senior. The brothers’ combined wealth is only surpassed in the US by Bill Gates and Warren Buffett. They are relatively liberal on social issues like gay marriage and stem cell research, but archly conservative on economic and environmental issues. Celebrated as one of New York’s most generous philanthropists, giving millions to everything from the New York Opera to the Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, David is considered the principal bankroller, the sugar daddy if you will, of the anti-climate science lobby, the Tea Party movement, and assorted libertarian causes.

Born May 3^rd, 1940 in Wichita, Kansas, he is one of the four children of Fred Koch, a chemical engineer and industrialist who became wealthy building oil refineries around the world. In 1967 he passed away and left the firm to his sons. Today, David is executive vice president and co-owner, with his brother Charles, of Koch Industries, the second largest privately held company in the US, employing 70,000 people in 60 countries and dealing primarily with oil and gas but also with business as diverse as cattle, chemicals, paper, and commodity trading, and products from Dixie Cups, Quilted Northern paper towels to Lycra.

His father was a founding member of the radically rightwing John Birch Society, infamous for its paranoia about government regulation and fear of Communist infiltration, and wrote admiringly of Mussolini’s suppression of Italian communists and disparagingly of the American civil rights movement.  David has since said that his father taught him at a young age that big government was dangerous and that governmental controls and regulations were detrimental to the economy and society.

His brother Charles is still based in Wichita, Kansas and has a more active role at Koch Industries, where he is the chairman of the board and CEO. He has published a book called The Science of Success (2007) describing his business strategy Market Based Management (MBM), which is about prioritizing long-term success over short-term gains. Charles seems to be slightly more intellectual than his brother David, who according to the New Yorker is “more cosmopolitan, and more genial”.[xi] The New Yorker also cites libertarian author Brian Doherty’s claim that the brothers agree on basically everything politically. While David’s philanthropy has benefitted both libertarian organizations and scientific and cultural landmarks like the Museum of Natural History and NY Ballet, Charles’ seem to have primarily gone to libertarian think tanks and organizations.

In 1980 Koch ran to the right of Reagan as the vice presidential candidate for the Libertarian Party, together with presidential candidate Ed Clark. He put $100,000 a month into the campaign, spending over $2 million altogether. Calling for the abolition of the FBI, CIA, SEC, Department of Energy, Social Security, public schools, minimum wage laws, gun control and all personal and corporate income taxes, and the legalization of prostitution, drugs, and suicide, they received 1.06% of the vote. The traditional conservative William F. Buckley Jr. referred to their movement as “Anarcho-Totalitarianism”.

After this failed campaign, the Koch brothers began to regard politicians as merely “actors playing out a script” and decided to put their vast resources into the sectors where the themes and words for these scripts are generated.[xii] They stepped up their influence of the “areas where policy ideas percolate from” and have together “AstroTurfed” dozens of rightwing think tanks, attack groups and publications.[xiii]  This ideological network has recently been dubbed “The Kochtopus”. From 1998 to 2008, Koch-controlled foundations gave out $196 million, most of it to conservative causes and institutions. This does not include $50 million in Koch Industries lobbying or $4 million in campaign contributions.

Here are some examples of the Koch family’s political spending. In 1977 Charles Koch founded the Cato Institute, the first libertarian think-tank in the United States, which still gets considerably funding from the brothers. Cato now has over a hundred full-time employees and has been particularly active in attacking regulations meant to combat global warming. Koch has also funded the Heritage Foundation to this end, as well as more obscure groups like the Independent Women’s Forum, run by a former Koch Industries lobbyist, which challenges the teaching of global warming as a scientific fact in American schools.

Koch founded and financed group Citizens for a Sound Economy, created in 1984 and active in lobbying against basically all government regulation, but particularly environmental legislation and the Environmental Protection Agency. Between 1986 and 1993 it was given $7.9 million by the Kochs and was able to mobilize 50 campaign workers in 26 states to rally voters to their agenda. In 1990 the group created a spinoff called Concerned Citizens for the Environment that was created to fight legislation meant to deal with acid rain. Critics claimed the group was completely steered from the top down and had zero citizen membership.[xiv] In 1994 it was “rented” by Phillip Morris and the tobacco industry to organize a campaign against tobacco industry regulations.[xv] 

Koch gave $800,000 to Bush and Republicans in the 2000 election and up to $20 million into different rightwing think tanks and organizations. Bush would later appoint Koch Industries and Citizens for a Sound Economy lobbyists into key environmental positions.[xvi]

In 2004 Citizens for a Sound Economy split and Koch founded the conservative non-profit Americans for Prosperity. The group has provided funding and training to the Tea Party movement. Americans for Prosperity put at least $45 million dollars into the 2010 midterm elections, giving more money to House candidates than any other organization, and gave generously to many Republican Senate candidates as well.

Unlike a figure like George Soros, who courts publicity, Koch has remained relatively unknown until recent profiles in New York Magazine and The New Yorker. Also unlike Soros, his political contributions more often than not coincide with his business interests, and it has been suggested that his libertarian zeal is symbiotic with his corporate interests to such an extent that it is likely not coincidental. Indeed, the watchdog group the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy has argued that much of the Koch’s giving has subverted the purpose of tax-exempt giving, in that much of it is self-serving.[xvii] For example, Koch Industries was recently labeled by Greenpeace to be the tenth largest air polluter in the United States,[xviii]simultaneously Koch Industries has lead all other energy companies in political contributions every year since 2006,[xix] and Koch Industries and the Koch family are the largest funders of climate science denying organizations in the world, spending nearly $50 million dollars.[xx] Koch himself has been forthright about his family’s influence on these groups: “If we’re going to give a lot of money, we’ll make darn sure they spend it in a way that goes along with our intent. And if they make a wrong turn and start doing things we don’t agree with, we withdraw funding.”[xxi]

Quotes

“You might ask: How does David Koch happen to have the wealth to be so generous? Well, let me tell you a story. It all started when I was a little boy. One day, my father gave me an apple. I soon sold it for five dollars and bought two apples and sold them for ten. Then I bought four apples and sold them for twenty. Well, this went on day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year, until my father died and left me three hundred million dollars!” – David Koch at a speech at Deerfield Academy, Massachusetts in 2003.[xxii]

"The Kochs are on a whole different level. There's no one else who has spent this much money. The sheer dimension of it is what sets them apart. They have a pattern of lawbreaking, political manipulation, and obfuscation. I've been in Washington since Watergate, and I've never seen anything like it. They are the Standard Oil of our times." – Charles Lewis, the founder of the Center for Public Integrity, a nonpartisan watchdog group

“If we’re going to give a lot of money, we’ll make darn sure they spend it in a way that goes along with our intent. And if they make a wrong turn and start doing things we don’t agree with, we withdraw funding.” David Koch to Brian Doherty[xxiii]

“The Kochs are longtime libertarians who believe in drastically lower personal and corporate taxes, minimal social services for the needy, and much less oversight of industry—especially environmental regulation. These views dovetail with the brothers’ corporate interests.” – Jane Mayer in The New Yorker

The Kochs are “at the epicenter of the anti-Obama movement. But it’s not just about Obama. They would have done the same to Hillary Clinton. They did the same with Bill Clinton. They are out to destroy progressivism.’ ­– Rob Stein, Democratic strategist

“What [the Tea Partiers] don’t say is that, in part, this is a grassroots citizens’ movement brought to you by a bunch of oil billionaires.” David Axelrod, quoted in the Jane Mayer New Yorker article

“The Kochs’ sense of imperilment is somewhat puzzling. Income inequality in America is greater than it has been since the nineteen-twenties, and since the seventies the tax rates of the wealthiest have fallen more than those of the middle class. Yet the brothers’ message has evidently resonated with voters: a recent poll found that fifty-five per cent of Americans agreed that Obama is a socialist.” Jane Mayer

“The problem with the whole libertarian movement is that it’s been all chiefs and no Indians. There haven’t been any actual people, like voters, who give a crap about it. So the problem for the Kochs has been trying to create a movement. [With the emergence of the Tea Party] everyone suddenly sees that for the first time there are Indians out there—people who can provide real ideological power. [The Kochs are] trying to shape and control and channel the populist uprising into their own policies.”” –Bruce Bartlett, a conservative economist and a historian, who once worked at the National Center for Policy Analysis, a Dallas-based think tank that the Kochs fund, quoted in  Jane Mayer

Positives One Should Arguably Be Aware Of

Since 2000 Koch has given more than $600 million to the arts, education and medical research, more than he has given to political causes.  In 2008 he was ranked seventh on Condé Nast Portfolio’s Generosity Index.

New York-Presbyterian Hospital Weill Cornell: $15 million

M.D. Anderson Cancer Center: $25 million

The Hospital for Special Surgery: $26 million

Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center: $30 million

Prostate Cancer Foundation: $41 million

Deerfield Academy: $68 million

Lincoln Center's NY State Theater: $100 million

Massachusetts Institute of Technology: $139 million[xxiv]

David was really good at basketball when he went to MIT, holding the record in points in a single game at 41.

His dad him made him ask for quarters if he wanted to go to the movies and work summers in the fields to learn responsibility and humility.

He got booed when he went to the ballet at the Brooklyn Academy of Music recently.[xxv]

Apparently he has no relation to the twins Derek and Daniel Koch (pronounced ‘cook’), who through parties in the Hamptons and now at the Oak Room at the Plaza Hotel.

Charles Koch and his wife Liz have two children, daughter Elizabeth and a son Chase. The son, who works for Koch Industries, recently married and bought a huge amount of property near Greenwich, CT.[xxvi] His wife Liz Koch runs the Koch Cultural Trust.[xxvii]
References

Andrew Goldman, “Billionaires Party”, New York Magazine, Jul 25, 2010. Available online at: http://nymag.com/news/features/67285/

Jane Mayer, “Covert Operations: The Billionaire Brothers who Are Waging a War Against Obama”, New Yorker, Aug. 30, 2010, Available online at: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/08/30/100830fa_fact_mayer

Koch defending himself from the New Yorker piece in a letter to the editor: http://www.kochind.com/files/Response%20to%20The%20New%20Yorker.pdf

David Alexrod, “The election campaigners we can’t see”, The Washington Post, Sept 23, 2010, Available online at: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/09/22/AR2010092204665.html

Frank Rich, “The Billionaires Banking the Tea Party”, NY Times, Aug 28, 2010. Available online at: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/29/opinion/29rich.html

Suzanne Goldenberg, “Tea Party Movement: Billionaire Koch brothers who helped it grow”, The Guardian, Oct 13, 2010, Available online at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/oct/13/tea-party-billionaire-koch-brothers

Greenpeace detailing of Koch’s war on the environment:

http://www.greenpeace.org/usa/campaigns/global-warming-and-energy/polluterwatch/koch-industries/