Part 158: The Contradictions of Rick Caruso – Privilege and Power in Los Angeles

Published February 27, 2025. Updated March 3, 2025.

Feb 27, 2025

Candidate Rick Caruso shakes hands at a debate with then Congresswoman Karen Bass in 2022 at the Skirball Cultural Center (Allen J. Schaben, Los Angeles Times).

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By Zachary Ellison, Independent Journalist

Former Mayoral candidate Rick Caruso, who also just happens to be a billionaire real estate developer, finally gave an interview worth listening to following a recent tour of podcasts that included Joe Rogan. In a new interview with journalist Bari Weiss on her podcast The Free Press entitled “Can Rick Caruso Save LA?” The answer is, at best, a resounding maybe, with Caruso not committing to challenging Mayor Karen Bass in 2028 and giving a pass for now on the race to replace outgoing Governor Gavin Newsom. Rick Caruso gives Bass a D grade and Newsom a B while maintaining that it’s “too early” to rate Donald Trump despite insisting that he disagrees with his political positioning on immigration. Trump, who vowed in his first administration to build a wall with Mexico and make our neighbor to the south pay for it, wins a pass from Caruso because he’s the elected President of the United States of America.

At the same time, Rick Caruso lavishes Elon Musk with praise for “donating his time to his country.” Weiss misses an opportunity to press him on whether Caruso thinks that Palisades fire recovery czar Steve Soboroff should be paid on the February 18 published recording. According to a new report from the Los Angeles Times by journalists Julia Wick and David Zahniser, in presumably knowingly recorded comments from Soboroff, he exclaims, “I was lied to” about the compensation for the position, maintaining that he thought he deserved an expected $500,000 for 3 months of work. It’s still unclear what exactly Soboroff was expected to provide in return, but perhaps Caruso should just pay him instead so Soboroff doesn’t have to complain about not getting a salary most Angeleno’s couldn’t dream of earning at the privileged Harvard-Westlake School. Meanwhile, Rick Caruso’s new foundation, Steadfast LA, has secured a donation of modular homes to replace those lost in the wildfires.

Ironically, during the 1 hour and 6 minute interview with Bari Weiss, the regal Rick Caruso describes a recent encounter with fellow billionaire Jeffrey Katzenberg, during which he refused to shake his hand, leaving Katzenberg “stunned” at the rebuff. Caruso says about those who oppose him, “If you want to oppose me, at least do it in a way that has a sense of honesty to it, but if you’re not going to be honest, I don’t want you in my world.” This after Caruso maintains that “core values and character matter.” Speaking about his time as Chairman of the Board of Trustees, Rick Caruso maintains that his biggest takeaway was reasonably that international students should have an easier path to remaining in the country after being educated. No surprise in what’s intended to be a friendly interview, Caruso doesn’t get pressed about the still-secret law firm investigation report into the alleged cover-up of sexual abuse by deceased gynecologist George Tyndall. Nor does he get asked about, as in a prior interview by Vanity Fair journalist Joe Hagan, about the source of the LA Fed Tapes. Who can blame Caruso, though, for such deflection?

Rick Caruso maintains that Jeffrey Katzenberg went after him inappropriately somehow during the 2022 election, maintaining he “disrespected my family.” The Vanity Fair article featured Katzenberg criticizing Caruso over his spending, which exceeded $100 million, instead of putting it into homelessness services on Skid Row. Previously, the two had clashed during the 2022 election over political advertising, with Katzenberg allegedly bullying Caruso by saying that “he’s made it abundantly clear that he is way too thin-skinned and temperamental to serve as our mayor.” Neither billionaire should likely be anywhere near Los Angeles government again. Caruso’s dark horse run coincided with the most famously distorted episode of wiretapping in Los Angeles political history, so it’s almost laughable when Weiss references Richard Nixon as a great Republican California political product before nervously pivoting to Ronald Reagan.

In fairness to Caruso, at least to date, the myth is holding that two employees of the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor AFL-CIO are responsible for the leak despite both maintaining their innocence and having been cleared of political charges. So where did those juicy recordings of Nury Martinez, Kevin de León, Gil Cedillo, and former LA Fed President Ron Herrera come from? Nury Martinez was all but run out of town; Gil Cedillo lame-ducked his way through the rest of City Council after being defeated by Eunisses Hernandez and Kevin de León is apparently now permanently sporting a beard in a recent interview with NBC4 Los Angeles journalist Conan Nolan about Trump’s immigration policy. De León had finished 3rd in the June 2022 primary behind Caruso and Bass, but clearly still has political ambition.

It may be that Los Angeles Times journalist Gustavo Arellano pronounced the end of his political career too soon as De León motormouthed his way through his apparent first interview since being out of office in favor of Ysabel Jurado. Arellano had written about De León, “Hubris was the engine of De León’s 18-year political career,” adding that “He gained enemies along the way but also followers who cast him as a Dickensian hero willing to fight for the neediest.” I had last seen KDL on the floor of the Los Angeles City Council as he made his final defiant appearance in the face of protest that had swelled before turning sporadic across nearly two years. KDL had not resigned. He also doesn’t want any questions about his lawsuit against the two accused leakers Santos Leon and Karla Vasquez, who might as well be the modern-day Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti. Caruso, who assuredly knows his Italian-American history, should know that the anarchist heroes were all but wrongly executed for crimes they hadn’t committed. In his Vanity Fair interview, he shamelessly blamed Karen Bass for the leak.

To date, not a single other publication has cared to even cover in any detail the civil case proceedings against Leon and Vasquez, which is more than ironic considering the Los Angeles Times won Pulitzer Prizes for their coverage of the scandal in the Breaking News category. Meanwhile, ink, at least for now, seems to have stopped being spilled over Times owner Patrick Soon-Shiong, who, unlike Caruso, has all but gone fully into Donald Trump’s camp. I guess Caruso really is a moderate? Kevin De León is set to take the couple to trial in June 2025 pending mediation and an appeal, and Gil Cedillo recently hired the same law firm, Geragos & Geragos. This may be the first time in the history of Los Angeles journalism that Mark Geragos took on a major case and received exactly zero media coverage. The sum total of the evidence against the two accused leakers seems to be their internet protocol address with nothing solid.

The reporter who broke the story that they would be cleared of criminal charges, journalist Stefanie Dazio of the Associated Press, has now left Los Angeles for Berlin. What was billed as a “scoop” by the AP was something I had been seeking for months. Meanwhile, Rick Caruso’s former VP and Chief of Staff at USC, Sam Garrison, was one of the few people to speak with any of the LA Fed Tape participants prior to their conversation being recorded on October 18, 2021. Sam Garrison had appeared on the final day at LA City Council, seated not far from current LA Fed President Yvonne Wheeler. Memory of the scandal is already slowly fading away from popular memory in Los Angeles, and equally long-running has been an investigation announced by the California Attorney General’s Office under Rob Bonta. Last October, the Los Angeles Times journalism pair of David Zahniser and Dakota Smith reported that negotiations were underway with the City of Los Angeles to redraw council district lines to be more equitable.

In 2021, while Rick Caruso was still Chairman of the USC Board of Trustees, the issue of which council district the university should be in again came up with USC having previously moved in 2012 from Council District 8 to 9. Councilmember Marqueece Harris-Dawson wanted it back, but USC’s position under Caruso and Sam Garrison was that USC should remain neutral in the dispute and, no matter what, should remain in the same district as neighboring Exposition Park. The late Latina politician Gloria Molina, then a fellow at USC, told Daily Trojan student journalist Suejin Lim that “the argument is kind of petty and ridiculous,” adding that “instead of talking about the richness of constituents that they represent and the opportunities they have to better serve those constituents, [councilmembers] are talking about these assets, or these resources, which is not the most significant part of the role and responsibility.” Little did Molina know that exactly this type of conversation had taken place a month prior and had been illegally recorded.

Rick Caruso himself is a topic of conversation early in the recording before the more infamous racially charged remarks amongst the participants, as is Sam Garrison. Nury Martinez seems to fear Caruso, but Kevin de León seems intrigued. It’s no secret that Caruso for decades now has been a key figure in Los Angeles City government in holding unelected positions as well as in making contributions. Rick Caruso continues to flex his financial muscles. Shortly before the new year, according to the Los Angeles City Ethics portal, he made an $1,800 donation to the 2026 re-election campaign of City Attorney Hydee Feldstein-Soto on December 23 that was returned on December 31. One source suggested that Feldstein-Soto may have not wanted to accept the donation to avoid drawing the ire of Mayor Karen Bass. A spokesman for the City Attorney’s Office didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment on why the maximum-limit donation was returned. Feldstein-Soto previously openly supported Caruso in the 2022 race.

About Rick Caruso’s political ambitions, rival Jeffrey Katzenberg had stated, “He’s made it abundantly clear that he is way too thin-skinned and temperamental to serve as our mayor.” In some ways, Caruso’s interview with Weiss represents a softening of his prior response in July 2023 to such questions that conveyed bitterness; Caruso’s representatives at the time had refused to address follow-up questions on his inflammatory remarks. Separately, Rick Caruso is now suing over his failed appeal against a planned renovation of CBS’s Television City lot by Hackman Capital, alleging violations of the California Environmental Quality Act, with the Los Angeles Times noting in its headline that he had once disparaged the law. Caruso denied being closely involved with the matter filed by The Grove’s parent company, but at the same time, Caruso and his son Justin Caruso have been highly visible in Montecito in the last year while seeking a resort expansion. In Los Angeles, politics and real estate are intimately linked, and land is as much about privilege so often as it is about power, and Caruso isn’t one to lose.

Rick Caruso tells Bari Weiss about Congressional leadership that “all the old guard should just retire,” insisting that both Mitch McConnell and Chuck Schumer should get out of the way for a new generation of leadership. But will Rick Caruso, age 66, take his own sage advice and forgo another run for elected office? Caruso also doesn’t apply the same test to Donald Trump, age 78, stating simply, “Despite my feelings on Donald Trump, I’m going to work with him because he’s the president.” Caruso says about the Democratic Party losing to Trump, “They need to have a really heavy dose of self-reflection and go back to priorities.” However, is Caruso above and beyond such prescriptive advice himself? Caruso says with emphasis that he’s considering his words that “elected officials start becoming dangerous when it’s more important to get re-elected than it is to do the right thing,” yet many have expressed similar feelings about the smoke-and-mirror strategies of real estate developers. It may just be that in Caruso’s world that hubris is everything, and power is a means to an end above itself; his privilege is natural.

Rick Caruso is no spring chicken, as my grandmother would have said. As his followers assiduously demand another run for him at elected office, you can only wonder if there’s anyone there advising him to hit the brakes on politics and focus more on philanthropy. About Caruso’s ambitions, Los Angeles Times columnist Gustavo Arellano wrote in 2022: “His futile effort reminds me of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s warning that ‘politics must not swallow up all of a people’s spiritual and creative energies.’” Will The Grove LLC’s lawsuit against Hackman Capital Partners become a legal sinkhole? Undoubtedly, such actions cost a pretty penny, and the risk in filing lawsuits, of course, is that you’ll not only lose but also end up having to pay attorney’s fees were the filing to be found frivolous and done in bad faith.

For their counterpart, Zach Sokoloff, Senior Vice President of Hackman Capital Partners, stated, “These coordinated lawsuits are an unfortunate but predictable abuse of CEQA to stop the Television City studio plan,” adding that “We’ve seen these same tactics throughout the hearing process.” Moreover, in a land of ingenuity, Sokoloff argued that “despite these continued efforts to block this investment into the entertainment industry, we remain steadfast in our commitment to keeping Hollywood in Hollywood.” Rick Caruso and his companies can undoubtedly afford to lose a lawsuit, and the arguments made about traffic impact seem audacious.

Rick Caruso’s retail properties, as noted on his eponymously named firm's website, have had an annual compounded growth rate of over 16% since being founded in 1987. Although Caruso wouldn’t be fully transparent about his wealth in his 2022 run for mayor, he’s not at risk of running out of money. Whether Caruso would embrace greater financial transparency in a future run for governor or mayor is a big question mark. Los Angeles Times journalist Michael Hiltzik, who has written for the troubled publication for more than 40 years, wrote that Caruso, like many real estate developers, had worked the tax system to his advantage such that he paid only a fraction of a percent in federal income taxes.

Hiltzik wrote in April 2022 about Caruso’s non-transparent disclosure statement: “He is the candidate with the arrogance to ask the voters to trust him while denying them the information they need to decide whether to do so.” Rick Caruso tells Bari Weiss, “Hold me accountable; don’t give me a pass because I’m a Republican or a Democrat.” Ultimately, the question becomes if Rick Caruso really even wants the type of accountability happening in his world, much less in the City of Los Angeles.

UPDATE: Tech executive Joe Lonsdale, a board member at Rick Caruso’s wildfire response organization Steadfast LA compared affordable housing proposals to installing a "new crack den”according to a new report in the Los Angeles Times by journalist Liam Dillon. Caruso is quoted as saying, ““Now is not the time for outside groups with no ties to the area to slow down the ability of people to rebuild their homes by trying to impose their agenda.” It wasn’t immediately clear if Caruso would condemn Lonsdale’s offensive remark. He remains listed on the Steadfast LA website.

Link: Can Rick Caruso Save LA?

Link: L.A. recovery czar vents over working for free: ‘I was lied to’

Link: Caruso-backed nonprofit partners with builder to give prefab homes to fire victims

Link: Can Anyone Fix California?

Link: Caruso vs. Katzenberg: L.A. titans bicker over ‘lying,’ bullying as election nears

Link: California Will Stand its Ground Against Feds

Link: Prosecutors will not file criminal charges against 2 people at center of Los Angeles racism scandal

Link: University and Exposition Park to remain in District 9

Link: Rick Caruso sues to stop Television City project, using a law he once disparaged

Link: Column: What $104 million could buy, instead of a failed mayoral run

Link: Caruso Financials

Link: Column: Rick Caruso’s useless tax disclosure shows that he thinks L.A. voters are idiots