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.

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.

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.

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.

Forbes estimated Speyer's net worth at $1.8 billion in 2011.

Speyer and his second wife, Katherine G. Farley, met in the Tishman Speyer offices; they were married in 1991. They have one daughter; Speyer has three children from his first marriage to Lynne Tishman. [Image via Getty]