David Koch

Quick facts

Key positions

Biography

David Hamilton Koch was born May 3, 1940, in Wichita, Kansas, the son of Fred C. Koch — a founding member of the John Birch Society who built Koch Industries into a major oil-refining and chemical enterprise. David earned chemical-engineering degrees at MIT, joined Koch Industries in 1970, and became president of its Koch Engineering subsidiary in 1979. In 1983, after a bitter family dispute, he and his older brother Charles bought out their brothers Frederick and William to become co-owners of Koch Industries, then the second-largest privately held company in the United States. While Charles ran strategy from Wichita, David based himself in New York City as the network’s public face and a high-profile philanthropist, giving to Lincoln Center, Memorial Sloan Kettering, and other institutions.

Historian Brian Doherty has described the brothers as “the biggest source of funding for libertarian causes in the 1970s and beyond.” David repeatedly cut large checks for the Libertarian Party from 1976 to 1979 and later joined the board and became a major funder of the Cato Institute (incorporated in 1974 as the Charles Koch Foundation, renamed Cato in 1976) — though, contrary to some accounts, he was not one of its original founders. In 1979 he was nominated as the Libertarian Party’s 1980 vice-presidential candidate alongside Ed Clark. In that 1980 race he contributed more than $2.1 million of the campaign’s roughly $3.5 million budget, exploiting campaign-finance rules that exempted candidates from contribution limits. The ticket ran on a platform calling to abolish Social Security, the Federal Reserve, welfare, the minimum wage, corporate taxes, the EPA, OSHA, the SEC, the FBI, the CIA, and public schools, and won 921,128 votes (about 1%). The New York Times later wrote that the campaign “shaped what the Kochs have become today.”

In 1984 Koch broke with the Libertarian Party — saying many of the hard-core libertarian ideas were unrealistic — registered as a Republican, and co-founded Citizens for a Sound Economy as a “grassroots” anti-regulation group. He and Charles then pursued the same radical free-market goals incrementally through Republican Party channels, becoming among the top backers of Bob Dole’s 1996 presidential campaign. Citizens for a Sound Economy split in 2004 into FreedomWorks and Americans for Prosperity, which became the network’s primary political-advocacy arm.

From roughly 2004 until his death, the brothers built an integrated donor network of an estimated 500 donors, candidates, and organizations — spanning Cato, the Reason Foundation, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the Heritage Foundation, the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), the State Policy Network, the Mercatus Center, and the Federalist Society. The network took in at least $407 million in the 2012 election cycle; that year David personally spent more than $100 million in a failed effort to oppose President Barack Obama’s re-election. Though David denied funding Tea Party candidates, the brothers’ 2010 efforts helped Republicans gain 63 House seats, and observers described the network as rivaling the Republican National Committee in clout. He survived a 1991 plane crash that killed 34 of 42 passengers, was diagnosed with advanced prostate cancer in 1992, and died of it on August 23, 2019, at age 79.

Sources

1. David Koch — Wikipedia — birth, education, career, 1980 campaign figures and vote total
2. Charles and David Koch — Britannica — overview of both brothers’ business and political activities
3. David Koch Dies; Conservative Billionaire Helped Reshape U.S. Politics — NPR (Aug. 23, 2019) — death, political legacy
4. How David Koch’s 1980 Fantasy Became America’s Current Reality — The New Republic — 1980 platform and its long-term influence
5. Cato Institute — Wikipedia — founding details; clarification that David was not an original founder
6. David H. Koch — SourceWatch — network funding and organizational role