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to do nothing but paint my picture every day for the rest of my life. And the gross
national product would go up." But "there's no reason future generations of Buffetts
should command society just because they came from the right womb. Where's the
justice in that?"
Billionaires can seem to have a power to conceal their actions that the Greek goddess
Athena would have understood—and they are as susceptible as any mortal to believing
their own mythology. But this can lead to problems when their power is questioned, as
possibly happened to this year's chattering-class billionaire, Ron Burkle, the mysterious
53-year-old who made his fortune in the very non-mysterious business of investing in
supermarkets. Burkle—who also works with President Clinton—is a fixture at the Mercer
Hotel, where he prefers to have breakfast and meetings when he's in town, instead of in
his office at Clinton's headquarters in Harlem. He has a pied-a-terre under renovation in
New York—which he splits with Leonardo DiCaprio—but is looking for something
nicer. He offered $17 million in cash to the owner of Sky Studios, the city's preeminent
bachelor pad, with rooftop pool, on lower Broadway, several times, but the owner,
himself a rich man, won't take anything under $17.2 million. They go back and forth
about it—pennies between stubborn men.
A large part of Burkle's life is spent doing business for unions—hence the script on his
757 private plane, "770BB," or Box Boy Local 770, the union he was in when he started
as a bag boy. He has given generously to the Urban League, Harlem Children's Zone, and
UCLA, among others. Some portion of the other half of his life is spent being glamorous.
He's invested in Scoop, the fancy boutique chain, and has anonymously underwritten
model enthusiasms, like his $200,000 contribution to Petra Nemcova's charity benefit for
tsunami victims. His stunning home in Los Angeles, Green Acres, is the most exceptional
charity-event space in the city—$100 million has been raised there in the past year, with
$1 million at a recent Clinton event. This fall, when the California governor asked his
help, he flew the Dalai Lama from New York and back.
It's difficult to live in the public eye while keeping full control of your image, even for a
billionaire, as Burkle found when he made the acquaintance of a "Page Six" writer of
questionable wardrobe and integrity named Jared Paul Stern. Burkle caught Stem on tape
allegedly trying to shake him down—but possibly in this case the cure was worse than
the disease, with Burkle, by many accounts an ordinary guy who does his own laundry,
suddenly as famous as Brad Pitt.
To defend his zone of privacy, Burkle has put together a fearsome, cloak-and-daggerish
security apparatus, including crisis manager Mike Sitrick (who was brought in to quiet
things down when hedge-fund manager Bruce McMahan was accused of conducting an
affair with his own daughter) and Frank Renzi (who was in President Clinton's Secret
Service detail).
His wife—who petitioned for alimony of $410,000 per month but eventually received
$40,000—provided a sobering view of the end of billionaire romance: "My husband is
enormously wealthy, a billionaire, has his own 757 jet, and literally could track me down
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