Who

The wife of former Citigroup chief Sandy Weill, Joan gives away the fortune her husband accumulated. She's one of the city's leading philanthropists.

Backstory

Joan met future financier Sandy on a blind date; they married in 1955 when Sandy was just 22, long before he had made his millions, let alone his billions. The couple honeymooned in the Catskills (a trip Joan had won them on a game show) and Joan spent the 1960s working as a teacher while Sandy began scaling the heights of Wall Street. As Sandy established himself as a demigod in the city's finance community—with a bank account to match—Joan turned her attention to charitable works.

Of note

Weill has been behind some massive donations. Over the past decade, she and her husband have donated more than $250 million to Cornell Medical School (there's a reason it's now the Weill Cornell Medical Center) and have contributed more than $30 million to Carnegie Hall in recent years. In 2001, the Weills handed Judith Jamison of the Alvin Ailey Dance Company $15 million as seed money for the new Joan Weill Center for Dance on 55th Street. Other recipients of the family's largesse include the University of Michigan's School of Public Policy, the National Academy Foundation, and the Hebrew Home for the Aged. Joan serves as chairman of the Alvin Ailey Dance Foundation, co-chair of the Women's Health Symposium at the Cornell Medical Center, and head of the board of trustees of Paul Smith's College of the Adirondacks.

Keeping score

The Weill family was worth $1.8 billion in 2007, according to Forbes.

Personal

Joan and Sandy have two grown kids, Marc and Jessica. Marc once worked for his father at Citigroup before resigning to enter rehab; he's now the founder and chief executive of City Light Capital. Jessica formerly worked for her father at Citigroup, too; she's now the CEO of her own firm, National Financial Partners.

Habitat

When the Weills were first married, they had to live at their parents' houses—his during the week and hers on the weekends. The Weills now reside in Manhattan's most prestigious new apartment building, 15 Central Park West, in a penthouse they paid $42.4 million for in 2007. (In late 2006, they sold their 90th St. co-op penthouse for $10.5 million.) They also own a home in Greenwich that has an 8,000-bottle wine cellar, as well as a weekend retreat in the Adirondacks.

True story

Be careful what information you share with your shrink. In 1990 a Manhattan psychiatrist named Dr. Robert Willis was indicted on insider trading charges after acting on information he'd gleamed during sessions with Joan. Several years earlier Sandy had been preparing to make a bid for a bank based in San Francisco; Joan had confessed to her shrink that she didn't really feel uprooting her family and moving out of New York.

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