Diddy’s Billionaire Buddy Ron Burkle Is No Stranger to Controversy

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 founded the private equity firm Yucaipa Companies, named after the small California town in which he lived. The firm did incredibly well—its website says its mergers and acquisitions have totaled over $40 billion in value since its founding.

Since getting his break at Yucaipa, Burkle has been a prodigious dealmaker.

He joined Mario Lemiux in 1999 for a bid to buy the Pittsburgh Penguins, saving them from bankruptcy and keeping them in the city. In 2010, he teamed up with Hollywood’s Ashton Kutcher to create A-Grade Investments, a venture capital firm that has invested in tech start-ups like Uber and Airbnb. And Burkle acquired a majority stake in Soho House—the once-hip boutique hotel chain known for its exclusive atmosphere—in 2012.

With his business success came chances for Burkle to befriend big-name public figures, a shocking number of whom have since found themselves mired in controversy.

During the 1990s, Burkle—a prominent Democratic fundraiser—became close with President Bill Clinton (so close that Clinton reportedly had a bedroom in Burkle’s mansion). The two soon struck up a successful business partnership that lasted through Clinton’s sex scandal. The relationship cooled around 2009 over a dispute in which Clinton insisted that Burkle owed him $20 million.

Clinton and Burkle also notoriously jetted around the world together, alongside a flock of young women, on the financier’s Boeing 787 (which Burkle’s young aides reportedly privately referred to as “Air F--- One”).

Some of their voyages together, however—reportedly humanitarian trips to Africa—came on disgraced child-sex-trafficker Jeffrey Epstein’s private Boeing 727. Burkle was named in Epstein’s court documents, but not in a criminal capacity.

Another of Burkle’s big-name friends was the “King of Pop,” Michael Jackson. Burkle even purchased Jackson’s famous California Neverland Ranch for $22 million in 2020. The sprawling estate had been vacant since Jackson abandoned it after he was acquitted on child sex-abuse charges.

But perhaps most topical is Burkle’s connection to the music mogul Diddy, who was recently arrested on sex-trafficking charges. In 2003, Burkle injected $100 million into Diddy’s fashion brand Sean John. The two teamed with movie star Mark Walhberg in 2015 to buy the since-failed water company AquaHydrate. Burkle is also reportedly the godfather of Diddy’s children.

In addition to his investing prowess and famous friends, Burkle is known for the magnitude of his civil suits—as both plaintiff and defendant.

The most notable include two suits stemming from a plan to bankroll a new Major League Soccer team in Sacramento, another against disgraced Italian real estate developer (and one-time Anne Hathaway boyfriend) Raffaello Follieri for misappropriating Burkle’s investment, and one more alleging that he was defrauded during his attempt to buy the Weinstein Company’s assets in the wake of the MeToo movement.

All this aside, maybe the most fascinating Burkle saga was his extortion feud with New York Post gossip writer Jared Paul Stern in 2006.

Burkle alleged that the Page Six freelancer tried to wrench $220,000 from him in exchange for more favorable coverage in the publication’s pages. Burkle reportedly got federal investigators to video a meeting between the two men in which Stern requested the money from Burkle.

Although Stern was never charged with a crime after an FBI investigation, he was fired by the Post.

Stern sued Burkle for defamation, which ultimately failed.