Who

The former chairman and CEO of Starwood Hotels and Resorts, Sternlicht now runs the real estate investment and private equity firm Starwood Capital Group.

Backstory

Sternlicht attended Brown (he majored in something called "Law and Society") and earned an MBA from Harvard before getting his start at Chicago-based firm JMB Realty, then one of the hottest property investors in the country. It was there that he first established himself as an aggressive dealmaker, making partner before he'd turned 30. But when the firm suffered sharp losses amid the real estate recession of the late '80s and decided to downsize, Sternlicht was shown the door. He bounced back after meeting the uber-wealthy Ziff and Burden families: In 1992, they handed over the first $20 million to finance Sternlicht's real estate investment firm Starwood Capital Group, and he earned a big win two years later when several of his early acquisitions were sold to real estate titan Sam Zell.

It wasn't until Sternlicht entered the hotel game, though, that he really landed on the real estate map. In 1997, Starwood teamed up with Goldman Sachs to acquire the Westin chain for $1.6 billion. Just weeks later, the firm snapped up the hotel conglomerate ITT—the owner of the Sheraton and Caesars chains, among other assets—for $14 billion. His most notable achievement soon followed: He set aside $5 million to launch a new chain named the W. (It was Sternlicht's wife who picked the name.) Modeled largely on the boutique hotel concept pioneered by Ian Schrager, the chain spread like wildfire in the late '90s, and Sternlicht also invested in the higher-end of the market, rolling out St. Regis as a worldwide luxury chain. By 2004 he had assembled one of the largest hotel conglomerates with over 700 properties in 80 countries. And then things got ugly. After bringing in a new CEO, Steven Heyer, and after tussling with both his successor and the board of directors, a demoralized Sternlicht stepped down from the company he'd founded in 2005.

Of note

Although he remains best known for his work building the Starwood empire, Sternlicht is now in the process of constructing yet another chain of properties around the world. Under the auspices of Starwood Capital (which is entirely separate from Starwood Hotels, his former company), in 2005 he acquired Société du Louvre from the Tattinger family for more than $3 billion, a deal that gave him control of 800 modest European inns and 14 luxury hotels, including the luxe Hotel de Crillon in Paris. He now plans to roll out the "Old World European-style" Crillon brand worldwide.

He's got plenty of other projects underway: He's launching a chain of eco-friendly condo/hotels called 1 Hotels & Residences, which will funnel 1% of their profits to local environmental organizations. And he's rolling out a series of hotels under the famed Baccarat name. (He owns a majority stake in the crystal maker.) He won't have any difficulty coming up with restaurants to install in his environmentally-friendly "1" properties. In 2007, he purchased a 50 percent stake in Steve Hanson's B.R. Guest restaurant empire (Blue Water Grill, Dos Caminos) and Hanson will now be responsible for both dining and room service at each of the "1" hotels.

Grudge

Sternlicht has long had tense relations with fellow hotelier Ian Schrager. The Starwood founder considered acquiring Schrager's properties in 1998; when the deal fell through, Sternlicht launched the W chain instead, using Schrager's boutique hotels as, well, "inspiration." ("There isn't an idea in W that's original," Schrager once told a reporter.) The rivalry heated up when Sternlicht lured bar maven (and Mr. Cindy Crawford) Rande Gerber, a onetime Schrager protégé, to the Starwood Hotels fold, acquiring a 49% stake in Gerber's company and tapping him to open bars in W hotels around the world, including all those Whiskey iterations that were popular a few years ago. The feud devolved into mutual lawsuits before the matter was settled out of court.

On the side

Along with Tom Freston, Kate Spade, and Bob Pittman, Sternlicht is an investor in erstwhile juice guy Tom Scott's Plum TV. He also owns Mammoth ski mountain in California: He bought the resort in 2006 for $365 million.

Personal

Sternlicht and his wife, Mimi, have three kids: Adrienne, James, and William. In addition to a sprawling Greenwich estate, they also have a 14,000-square-foot, six-bedroom oceanfront home in Nantucket, which they purchased for $9.65 million in 2004, and a mountainside mansion at the invitation-only Yellowstone Club, the luxe ski and golf community in Montana.