Who

Speyer is the chief of real estate behemoth Tishman Speyer, owner of the MetLife Building, Rockefeller Center, Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village, among other properties.

Backstory

Raised in a German-speaking Jewish family on Riverside Drive (his father was German, his mother Swiss), Speyer stayed on the Upper West Side for college, studying German at Columbia and sticking around to pick up his MBA. In 1966, he joined the contractor/developer Tishman Realty, working as an assistant to Robert Tishman, the patriarch of the Tishman clan and—not coincidentally— Speyer's father-in-law at the time; by 1970, Speyer was the firm's 30-year-old heir apparent. A messy bid to take Tishman Realty private in 1976 resulted in the Tishman family splintering into several different factions, with Speyer and his father-in-law going off to form their development company, Tishman Speyer, two years later. (Another faction, headed by John Tishman—the father of Dan Tishman—formed Tishman Realty & Construction.)

In its early years, Tishman Speyer acquired and developed properties all across the U.S.; by 1986, Speyer decided the domestic market had peaked and started to unload the company's buildings. During the ensuing recession, Speyer turned abroad for building opportunities, eventually developing the 62-story Messeturm (Europe's second-tallest building) in Frankfurt—his father's hometown—in 1990. Tishman Speyer has since remained a global real estate player, and has redoubled its position in American real estate.

Of note

Tishman Speyer now owns roughly as much land as a small European principality—more than 80 million square feet of commercial and residential space. International properties account for about half of Tishman Speyer's sprawling portfolio, and the firm has offices in Paris, London, Berlin, Frankfurt, Brussels and Sao Paulo. Closer to home, TS owns a handful of  trophy properties, including Rockefeller Center, the MetLife Building, and a minority stake in the Chrysler Building. But unlike many of the city's real estate titans who buy for the long haul, Speyer is perfectly willing to flip a building soon after he buys it. In 2006, Tishman Speyer sold 666 Fifth Avenue, a 2000 acquisition, to Charles and Jared Kushner's Kushman Companies for a record-breaking $1.8 billion. In April 2007, Speyer sold the New York Times building to Israeli billionaire Lev Leviev for $525 million, having bought it less than three years before for $175 million. Around the same time he and his business partners sold the famous Lipstick Building—which he'd bought for $235 million in 2004—for $648.5 million.

But Tishman Speyer has hardly slowed down on the acquisition front. In October 2006, the company paid $5.4 billion for the 110-building, 80-acre Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village; a year later Speyer plunked down $22.2 billion for Archstone-Smith, a Colorado-based apartment building REIT. In yet another massive deal, in March 2008 Speyer won the highly-contested race to redevelop Hudson Yards, the 26-acre swath of rotting rail yards on both sides of 11th Avenue between 30th and 33rd Streets. But in a rare setback for the company, the deal fell through two months later, after the MTA refused to accept Tishman Speyer's last-minute demands to change the terms of the deal.

Now nearing 70, Jerry is preparing for his eventual retirement. Many of the company's recent deals—including Stuy Town and Hudson Yards—were orchestrated by Speyer's son, Rob Speyer, a senior managing partner at Tishman Speyer and the head of its New York division. Rob is also currently leading the firm's $800 million co-development of a new stadium for the Yankees in the Bronx.

Keeping score

Forbes estimated Speyer's net worth at $2.0 billion in 2008.

Board game

A backroom power-broker extraordinaire and giant on the philanthropy circuit, Speyer has possibly the most expansive board presence of any New Yorker (with the possible exception of his wife). In May 2007, he was elected chairman of the MoMA; he's also serving out a term as the chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. He sits on the board of the Yankees, Carnegie Hall, the RAND Corporation, Columbia University (chairman emeritus), the New York-Presbyterian Hospital (vice chair), and the Partnership for New York City (chairman emeritus). He also used to be the chairman of Dalton, his children's alma mater.

Obsession

As one would expect from the chairman of MoMA, Speyer is a prodigious collector of contemporary art. Several of the pieces he owns are on display in his properties: He installed a 20-foot graffiti-covered slab of the Berlin Wall at his building 520 Madison, and Jeff Koons's famous 43-foot flower sculpture, Puppy, at Rockefeller Plaza in 2000. In addition to Koons, artists especially well represented in his collection include Frank Stella, Eric Fischl, and Andy Warhol. Speyer claims he hasn't sold a single artwork in the four-plus decades he's been collecting.

Personal

Speyer divorced his first wife Lynne in 1987. Four years later he married fellow Tishman Speyer exec Katherine Farley. In addition to Rob Speyer, Jerry has two grown children from his marriage to Tishman: Valerie Speyer Peltier (who's also a Tishman Speyer employee) and Holly. He also has a younger daughter from his marriage to Farley, Laura. Speyer lives in a Williams & Tsien-designed 40-foot-wide townhouse on East 72nd Street, which cost $21 million when he had it built in the mid-'90s; visitors are handed a catalogue to make sense of the copious artwork on display in the house.

No joke

The solemn-mannered real estate titan has a few habits befitting an eight-year-old. He wears a Mickey Mouse watch. And as the official 1955 New York State Yo-Yo Champion, he can still do a mean walk-the-dog: In February 2007 he squared off against a hired yo-yo expert at the bar mitzvah of Joseph Tisch (Tom Tisch's son), matching the pro yo-yo-er trick for trick.