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David H. Koch
Born	1940 (1940) United States
Occupation	Executive Vice President
Net worth	US$19 billion (Sep, 2008)

David Hamilton Koch (pronounced /ˈkoʊk/ "coke", born March 5, 1940) is an American engineer, billionaire and businessman. He is one of the co-owners (with older brother Charles) and an executive vice president of Koch Industries, a conglomerate with major petroleum and natural gas holdings that is the second largest privately held company (after Cargill) in the United States.^[1] He lives in New York City and is its second wealthiest resident after Michael Bloomberg.^[2]

Biography

David Koch was the Libertarian Party's vice-presidential candidate in the 1980 US presidential election, sharing the party ticket with Ed Clark. The Clark-Koch ticket received just under one million popular votes and remains the most successful Libertarian presidential campaign to date.

David Koch currently serves on the board of directors of the libertarian Cato Institute and the Reason Foundation. His brother Charles Koch has also been active in organizing and funding foundations and think-tanks such as the Cato Institute.

David Koch is one of four sons of petroleum industry innovator Fred C. Koch. He attended Deerfield Academy and then the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). David received both bachelor's and master's degrees in chemical engineering in 1962 and 1963 respectively. He also started for MIT in basketball, establishing an MIT record by scoring an average of 21 points per game over three years. He was captain of the team in his senior year, 1962. He held MIT's single-game scoring record of 41 points, which he set in 1962, until it was broken in early 2009 by Jimmy Bartolotta.

Philanthropy

In July 2008, it was announced that New York State Theater in Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts would be renamed the David H. Koch Theater after he pledged $100 million over 10 years to renovate the theatre.^[3]

David Koch is also a major contributor to the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) show Nova, and the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. In 2006, he made a $20 million gift to the American Museum of Natural History, creating the David H. Koch Dinosaur Wing. He made a second contribution of $15 million to the museum in 2009 to create a new hall on human evolution. The 15,000-square-foot space will be named for David Koch and is scheduled to open in March 2010. ^[4]

He financed the construction of Deerfield Academy's $68 million state-of-the-art Koch Center for mathematics, science and technology.

A prostate cancer survivor himself,^[5] Koch also sits on the Board of Directors of the Prostate Cancer Foundation and is the eponym of the David H. Koch Chair of the Prostate Cancer foundation, a position currently held by Dr. Jonathan Simons.

He contributed $100 million in 2007, to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to help fund the construction of a new 350,000 square foot research and technology facility to serve as the home of the David H. Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research.^[6] He also contributed $20 million to Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore, $30 million to the Memorial Sloan–Kettering Cancer Center in New York, $25 million to the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, and $15 million to New York-Presbyterian Hospital Weill Cornell Medical Center.

Koch, along with his brother Charles, George Soros, the Ford Foundation, and the Rockefeller Foundation, each contributed $10 million to the American Civil Liberties Union to defeat parts of the USA PATRIOT Act.^[7] Parts 15, 16, 17 of the act were then overturned in U.S. federal court in the Southern District of New York. Marion Bowman, chief legal counsel of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, vowed to take this decision to the United States court of appeals.

Political advocacy

In 1984, Koch founded Citizens for a Sound Economy. Koch also funds Americans for Prosperity, a conservative advocacy group that has recently used new media technologies and other efforts to create opposition to U.S. President Barack Obama's proposed health care reforms.^[8]

See also

• List of billionaires

References