Canadian businessman and philanthropist Peter Munk has died at age 90. Munk was a 20-year-old Hungarian immigrant when he arrived in Canada in 1947. He went on to create Barrick Gold, the world’s biggest gold-mining company, and to donate millions of dollars to worthy causes. “Munk passed away peacefully in Toronto today, surrounded by his family,” the mining company said in a release Wednesday. In his later years, his focus turned to philanthropy, donating $300 million to numerous causes, most notably in a $100 million gift to found the Peter Munk Cardiac Centre at the Toronto General Hospital in 1997. It was the largest single gift ever donated to a Canadian hospital. He also funded the Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto with $51 million over the years, something the school’s former director Steven Toope says was born of Munk’s belief that Canadians embodied values like openness and integrity, two things the world needed more Peter Munk is survived by Melanie, his wife of forty-five years, by his five children, Anthony, Nina, Marc-David, Natalie, and Cheyne, and by his fourteen grandchildren.
