David Koch and his brother Charles Koch are co-owners of the Wichita-based Koch Industries Inc. David Koch is the executive vice president of the conglomerate, which happens to be the second largest private company in the US. As of 2010, David Koch is the current richest citizen of New York.
David Koch inherited his innovativeness, as well as a part of his wealth from his father Fred C. Koch who was a renowned innovator in the petroleum industry. In spite of high academic achievements, David Koch was a diehard sportsman and established basketball records in MIT that held from 1962, till they were recently broken in 2009.
David Koch was one of the earliest proponents of the Libertarian Party with the agenda of curtailing government intervention, surveillance, and regulation in public and private life. The Libertarian Party also supported the legalization of prostitution, recreational drugs and suicide, while calling for the abolition of minimum-wage laws and social security, and corporate taxes. He became a Republican in 1984. David Koch is reputedly one of the staunchest funders of the new Tea Party movement.
David Koch is reputed to be one of the heaviest donors and funders for different political movements, as well as organizations supporting arts, medical research, and education. His career history, is in fact, a history of donations and providing money to causes deemed worthy by him.
David Koch has donated liberally for educational purposes and his lasting donations include a $20 million gift to the American Museum of Natural History, to create the David Koch Dinosaur Wing, and a donation of $15 million to the National Museum of Natural History for creating the David Koch Hall of Human Origins. David Koch is also the first and lifetime trustee of Deerfield Academy's $68 million Koch Center for mathematics, science, and technology.
David Koch is also known for his financial contributions to support the cause of medical research. A survivor of prostate cancer, he is a member of the Board of Directors of the Prostate Cancer Foundation and has until now donated $41 million to the cause of the foundation. The MIT received a whopping $100 million from him to create the David Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research. Other organizations like the John Hopkins University School of Medicine, Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, M.D. Anderson Cancer Center and other organizations around the country have frequently received contributions from him ranging from $15 million to $30 million.
Of course, all these donations of David Koch hardly went unnoticed, and in August 2010, Jane Meyer of the New Yorker, who never received any funding from David Koch, wrote in an editorial, ''There's no one else who has spent this much money. The sheer dimension of it is what sets them (the Koch brothers) apart. They have a pattern of lawbreaking, political manipulation, and obfuscation.'' Well, grapes are sour, for sure.