Ron Burkle is currently in headlines for his failed bid to erect an outlandish townhouse in the British countryside. But the billionaire investor—whose portfolio includes tech giants like Uber and Airbnb, the stylish hotel chain Soho House, and the NHL’s Pittsburgh Penguins—is hardly a newcomer to controversy. In fact, his personal history is riddled with ties to contentious and disgraced public figures ( Sean “Diddy” Combs , Bill Clinton, Jeffrey Epstein , and Michael Jackson , to name a few), massive lawsuits often related to his aggressive business tactics, and a saga involving the FBI that resulted in a New York Post writer being fired for extortion.
Reportedly worth around $3 billion, Burkle comes from comparatively humble beginnings . Born in 1952, Burkle, the son of a Stater Bros. grocer, first started working in a market at age 13 and worked his way to become vice president at Stater’s parent company, Petrolane.
His first brush with controversy came in 1980, when he worked secretly to develop a bid to buy Stater from Petrolane with the help of Berkshire Hathaway’s Charlie Munger. But internal valuations were 20 percent higher than the offer, so it was rejected and Burkle was fired. “It was a rather dramatic change of events—and it turned out to be the best thing ever, because if I had stayed there I never would have thought about being entrepreneurial,” he told Forbes in 2006.
He spent the next five years successfully investing in stocks before he .
