David Koch

David Koch is a figure I find impossible to flatten into a single judgment. An MIT-trained chemical engineer who helped build Koch Industries into one of America's largest private companies, he wielded enormous political influence that made him a lightning rod for fierce debate. Yet he also poured fortunes into hospitals, research, and the arts. I'm drawn to people who resist easy categorization, and Koch is exactly that: brilliant, polarizing, consequential. Whatever your politics, you cannot tell the story of late-twentieth-century American power and money without him. His 2019 death closed a genuinely outsized chapter.

Name (English)

David Koch

Name (Japanese)

デイビッド・コーク

Reading

でいびっど・こーく

Born

May 3, 1940 – August 23, 2019

Zodiac / Chinese zodiac

Taurus / Dragon

Origin

Wichita, Kansas, United States

Occupation

businessperson / engineer / entrepreneur / politician / merchant

• Official sitehttps://davidkochfoundation.org
• Wikipedia (English)https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David%20Koch
• Wikipedia (Japanese)https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E3%83%87%E3%82%A4%E3%83%93%E3%83%83%E3%83%89%E3%83%BB%E3%82%B3%E3%83%BC%E3%82%AF
• Wikidatahttps://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q1174641

Tags

• Kansas
• businessperson
• engineer
• entrepreneur

Last updated

2026-06-17

Facts are limited to publicly available information up to 2024; non-public or unconfirmed items are omitted. English text is machine-assisted (facts translated by Sonnet, "My Take" written by Opus 4.8). The Japanese page is the source of record.