David Hamilton Koch was an American businessman, philanthropist, political activist, and chemical engineer. He joined the family business Koch Industries, the second-largest privately held company in the United States, in 1970. He became president of the subsidiary Koch Engineering in 1979 and became a co-owner of Koch Industries, with elder brother Charles in 1983. He served as an executive vice president until his retirement in 2018.
David Koch is famous for a businessman. He became president of the subsidiary Koch Engineering and became a co-owner of Koch Industries.
David Koch was born on May 3, 1940, in Wichita, Kansas. He holds American nationality and belongs to white ethnicity. His birth sign is Taurus. He was born to a father named Fred Chase Koch and a mother named Mary Clementine. His father was a chemical engineer. His was the third of four sons, with elder brothers Frederick R. Koch, Charles Koch, and nineteen-minute-younger twin, Bill Koch. He attended the Deerfield Academy prep school in Massachusetts and graduating in 1959. He attended Massachusetts Institute of Technology, earning both a bachelor's and a master's degree in chemical engineering.
David Koch embarked on an engineering career and worked as a research and process design engineer at several consulting firms over the next few years. In 1970, he joined the family business, Koch Industries. He went on to found the company's New York office and by 1979 had become the president of his own division, Koch Engineering which was later renamed Chemical Technology Group. He developed an interest in politics and became the Libertarian Vice-Presidential candidate in the U.S. presidential election in 1980, sharing the party ticket with presidential candidate Ed Clark. In 1984, he broke with the Libertarian Party, when it supported eliminating all taxes. Since then he has been a Republican. In 1984, he along with his brother Charles established Citizens for a Sound Economy, a conservative political group operating in the United States. The group was dedicated to free markets and called for the highest level of personal involvement in public policy activism. In 1992, he was diagnosed with prostate cancer and underwent surgery, radiation and hormone therapy. His personal experiences as a cancer patient motivated him to fund medical research. He served on the boards of more than 20 non-profit corporations including the National Cancer Advisory Board of the National Cancer Institute, M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Texas, Rockefeller University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Aspen Institute, among others.
David Koch died at his home in Southampton, New York on August 23, 2019, at age 79.
David Koch received the prestigious Corporate Citizenship Award from the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in 2004. He was honored with the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center's Excellence in Corporate Leadership Award in 2005. He was also the recipient of Americans for Prosperity Foundation's George Washington Award for Principled Leadership in 2007.
David Koch was a married man. He married Julia Flesher in 1996. They had three children.
David Koch was a businessman. He earns a good amount of money from his profession. There is no information about his net worth and salary.
1. He was a member of the Beta Theta Pi Fraternity.
2. He was an active sportsman, a skilled player of basketball.
3. He was the fourth richest person in the US as of 2012 and the wealthiest resident of New York City as of 2013.