Donald Sterling

The billionaire created his wealth via buying apartments throughout Los Angeles, where he still owns buildings on the Westside and Koreatown. Sterling began as an attorney before building a real estate empire. He owns the Beverly Hills Plaza Hotel. He is the ex-owner of the Clippers and was forced to sell after racist remarks via private recordings surfaced and he was barred from the NBA. Sterling, at the time, said “I’m not a racist. I made a terrible mistake.”

In the early 2000s, before he received the NBA lifetime ban and was ordered to pay a multimillion dollar fine, the Department of Justice sued Sterling. He later agreed to pay $2.7 million to settle allegations that he, his wife Rochelle Sterling and the Sterling Family Trust, discriminated against Black and Latino families at apartments he owned in Los Angeles. The Sterlings are still married, and she is said to have a role in the business — though they have three children, which begs the question of who would be heir to the empire. 

More than a decade ago, Sterling purchased a Beverly Hills mansion for over $18 million from Tom Whalley, the former chairman and chief executive of Warner Bros.