In October, Trump demolished the East Wing of the White House to make room for a ballroom extension funded by private donors.
Aaron Schwartz/Bloomberg
The list of billionaires and companies who have donated to help build a gigantic gilded ballroom where the East Wing of the White House used to be has plenty of familiar names on it. Amazon. Apple. Comcast. Miriam Adelson. The Winklevoss twins. And then, there’s Stefan E. Brodie.
Brodie, it turns out, is one more billionaire. He and his brother Donald cofounded Purolite, a company that manufactures resins used for water purification across a range of industries, then sold it to chemicals giant Ecolab in 2021 for $3.7 billion. When Steve Brodie showed up on the Trump ballroom donor list, he raised his profile—and now, he and his brother are the newest members of the Forbes Billionaires List. Assuming they owned the company 50/50, they’re each worth about $1.7 billion today, Forbes estimates.
The Brodies started Purolite in 1981 in Don’s basement in Pennsylvania. They found their niche—distributing high-end ion exchange resins, essentially specialized balls of plastic used for water purification, drug manufacturing, pollution cleanup and other processes. Four years later, Purolite made the jump to manufacturing, opening a converted factory in Pontyclun, South Wales in the United Kingdom. In 1987, the Brodies began manufacturing in Philadelphia as well, lost their factory to a fire a year later, then rebuilt an even bigger facility as demand ramped up.
The 1990s brought more plants in newly liberalized China and behind the collapsed Iron Curtain in Romania, along with sales offices across Eastern Europe and East Asia. But it was that first factory in the U.K. that brought trouble in a tropical paradise: In 2000, both brothers were indicted for allegedly violating the American embargo on Cuba by shipping some $2.1 million in resins to the Caribbean island, largely from the British side of the company, throughout the 1990s. They were convicted in 2002, but fought the verdict for several more years before the Third Circuit Court of Appeals swatted their attempts down. “The government’s evidence paints a convincing picture of the Defendant as a company president who deliberately stuck his head in the sand regarding the involvement of the U.S. entity in the prohibited transactions,” the court wrote of Stefan in 2005. Both brothers were sentenced to probation.
Legal troubles didn’t slow Purolite down, and the Brodies continued expanding, opening even more sales offices in Japan, Mexico, Jordan, Uzbekistan, South Africa and India throughout the 2000s and 2010s. By 2021, they had averaged 14% annual revenue growth for five years, sporting $390 million in revenue and $160 million in adjusted EBITDA. That year, they sold Purolite to Ecolab, a $72 billion (current market cap) company specializing in water quality, hygiene and infection prevention, for $3.7 billion in cash. After taxes, Forbes estimates that the sale netted each brother more than $1.3 billion. Ecolab spokesperson Kyle Kapustka confirmed Purolite’s financials but otherwise declined to comment on the Brodie valuation, noting that “there has been no association between the Brodies and Ecolab in the time since” the deal.
Already longtime small-ball GOP donors, Don and Steve ramped up their political giving in 2022. They backed Florida governor Ron DeSantis in his ill-fated run for president in 2023, then switched to supporting Trump afterwards. Their total political giving in federal races, according to an analysis of Federal Election Commission data, is about $10 million and $2 million, respectively. Stefan’s wife Elizabeth looks to have given another $3 million or so.
At some point, both brothers applied for a presidential pardon—and were denied in December 2023 by Joe Biden. Their favored candidate won the 2024 election, though, and their support hasn’t stopped. Steve and Elizabeth have sent over $1 million to GOP-aligned groups in 2025, including $500,000 to a Trump-supporting PAC that has reportedly set up “candlelight dinners” for donors at Mar-a-Lago, the president’s Palm Beach club and home since his first term. Steve was also listed as a donor for Trump’s ballroom construction, though the White House didn’t provide details on individual donations.
If they’re so inclined, the next softly-lit dining event won’t be difficult to attend. Despite running a Pennsylvania-based company, the Brodie brothers bought South Florida mansions in 1998 and 2000. Steve’s, located on private Fisher Island, is worth $10.7 million, Forbes estimates, while Don’s, in Boca Raton, is worth $6.5 million. Both are well within driving distance of Mar-a-Lago, in other words—and both are just a few hundred miles of ocean from the communist dictatorship that got them in so much trouble a quarter-century ago.