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

Sternlicht attended Brown 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. Just weeks later, the firm snapped up the hotel conglomerate ITT, which owned the Sheraton and Caesars chains, among other assets. His most notable achievement soon followed: He set aside $5 million to launch a new chain named the W. 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. 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),he has focused on "Old World European-style" and eco-friendly condo/hotels. [Image via Getty]