Billionaire Eli Broad, one of the top 100 richest Americans, has died at the age of 87. On Saturday, May 1, NBC News reported.
According to media reports, Broad died at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center after a long illness.
“Eli Broad was the most powerful private citizen of Los Angeles of his generation,” Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti wrote in Twitter.
The mayor added that Broad was a dreamer, often seeing things that others didn’t. The billionaire built homes, “brought to life educational opportunities and health achievements that made people’s dreams come true,” Garcetti said.
Broad was the 85th richest American in the world. His net worth at the time of his death was estimated at $6.9 billion, according to the Forbes real-time rating.
The billionaire was born in 1933 in New York to a family of emigrants from Lithuania. He received his bachelor’s degree from the University of Michigan in 1954. In 1957, with Donald Kaufman, he founded Kaufman & Broad, which became one of the largest residential real estate developers in the United States.
Together with his wife, Broad founded and funded various projects in the fields of education, science and the arts. The couple have invested more than $1 billion to build and support the Broad Institute, a research center dedicated to genomic medicine.
