The Political Transformation of California’s Billionaire Mall King
Rick Caruso, the mogul behind Los Angeles’ shopping meccas, lost the mayor’s race in 2022. Rebuilding after the wildfires has suddenly put him in the running for governor.
Caruso outside a building destroyed by fire, across the street from his Palisades Village mall in Los Angeles.
Photographer: Philip Cheung for Bloomberg BusinessweekIn early January, a wildfire started smoldering in a tinder-dry part of Southern California where it hadn’t rained in eight months. The Santa Ana winds kicked up, stirring a cyclone of flames that hurled embers the size of sparrows into the Pacific Palisades. The coastal enclave was home to Hollywood celebrities including Tom Hanks, Ben Affleck and Kate Hudson who, up until then, could be forgiven for thinking they’d landed in a particular slice of paradise: a walkable village in the land of freeways, nestled between the Pacific Ocean and the Santa Monica Mountains. The blaze was unrelenting, engulfing multimillion-dollar homes as it skipped from yard to yard. By the time it was fully contained, two-thirds of the neighborhood had been razed. Between the Palisades fire and another blaze ripping through the Los Angeles suburb of Altadena, the January wildfires were the most destructive in LA history.
News cameras broadcasting scenes of the wreckage to the rest of the country lingered on one freakish visual: A quaint shopping center called Palisades Village remained perfectly intact, while almost everything around it had burned. Its buildings had been inspired by the old-money main streets of East Hampton and Nantucket, while the shops were a cross between California classics and bougie essentials: a burger joint and an old-timey movie theater coexisting with Saint Laurent and Erewhon. From afar, it seemed like a miracle. But the mall hadn’t been saved by providence. It was still standing because its owner, the real estate billionaire Rick Caruso, had hired private firefighters.