Edythe Broad is the widow of Eli Broad, the founder of homebuilding firm KB Home and the insurance company SunAmerica. ¹ Chris Power, “Billionaire Sought to Make Los Angeles a Cultural Capital,” Washington Post, May 3, 2021.[/note] With her husband, she co-founded the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation, which supports education-related programs, medical research, and cultural programs, and the Broad Art Foundation, which supports  purchasing and displaying art, including supporting The Broad, an art museum in Los Angeles.

Broad Family

In 2022, Forbes estimated that Edythe Broad and her family were worth $6.9 billion and that she and her family had donated $2.8 billion, making them the 11^th-most-generous givers in the U.S. ²

In a 2013 profile in Philanthropy, Aaron Gell reported that in their philanthropy, Edythe and Eli Broad had worked as a team, “He’s analytical,” Gell wrote.  “She’s intuitive.” ³ Eli Broad died in 2021. ⁴

In 2010, Eli and Edythe Broad signed the Giving Pledge and promised to give away 75 percent of their fortune “during or after our lifetimes.” ⁵

Giving

When deciding to create the Eli and Edythe L. Broad Institute at MIT, an interdisciplinary institute studying the human genome funded with $600 million of Broad Foundation donations, they met with Eric Lander, director of the Human Genome Project at MIT, who pitched the idea of a new institute to study the genome. “Eli, being Eli, went and did a tremendous amount of due diligence,” Lander said. “And Edythe, being Edythe, was very intuitive and said, ‘This makes a lot of sense,’” Edythe Broad said, ‘I just fell in love with Eric Lander and what he was doing.  I wanted to give him all my money.’” ⁶

In a 2015 profile in the Los Angeles Times, Eli Broad credited Edythe Broad with the Broad Foundation’s purchase of pre-Columbian art and the Broad foundation’s support of classical music. The Times reported that because of Edythe Broad’s friendship with singer and conductor Placido Domingo, the Broad Foundation was among the opera’s largest donors. ⁷

1. Chris Power, “Billionaire Sought to Make Los Angeles a Cultural Capital,” Washington Post, May 3, 2021.
2. “America’s Top Givers,” Forbes, February/March 2022.
3. Aaron Gell, “Playing the Long Game,” Philanthropy, Fall 2013.
4. Chris Power, “Billionaire Sought to Make Los Angeles a Cultural Capital,” Washington Post, May 3, 2021.
5. “Eli and Edythe Broad,” https://givingpledge.org/pledger?pledgerId=174 (accessed April 11, 2022)
6. Aaron Gell, “Playing the Long Game,” Philanthropy, Fall 2013.
7. Jeffrey Fleishman, “A Gentle Touch and A Natural Eye:  With Quiet force, Edye Broad Drew Her Husband into Art,” Los Angeles Times, August 23, 2015.