Bernie Marcus, the billionaire who co-founded Home Depot and became a Republican megadonor and supporter of civic and political causes in the United States and Israel, has died. Marcus, 95,

A man of second acts, Marcus started Home Depot after getting fired from another retailer. He then became a philanthropist, a Republican megadonor and an evangelist of capitalism.

After getting fired together from a hardware business in the 1970s, Bernard Marcus and Arthur Blank set out to build their own retail chain. They started with a few stores in Atlanta and built Home Depot into a national powerhouse that made them both billionaires.