Jerry Speyer

American real estate developer (born 1940)

Jerry I. Speyer (born June 23, 1940) is an American real estate developer. He is one of two founding partners of the New York real estate company Tishman Speyer, which controls Rockefeller Center. Speyer was featured in the Forbes 400 list in 2021.

Speyer was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, the son of Germaine M. and Ernst A. Speyer. According to a 1998 profile in The New York Times, "[Speyer's] mother is Swiss, and his father comes from one of the old Jewish families of Frankfurt" (however, there is only a very distant connection to the Speyer banking family, if any); his father, a shoe manufacturer, fled Germany in 1939, established a business in Milwaukee, before moving to New York when Jerry was three months old. Speyer grew up in a cultured German Jewish household on Riverside Drive. He graduated from the private Horace Mann School. At Columbia University, he majored in German literature and joined Zeta Beta Tau, a Jewish fraternity. He was a friend of Art Garfunkel and Sanford Greenberg, his roommates, and Michael Mukasey. "Speyer was one of those people who were solid, and even solemn, at an age when others are still flailing and unsure of themselves." Speyer graduated from Columbia College in 1962 and received an MBA from Columbia Business School in 1964.

Speyer began his career in 1964 as Assistant to the Vice President of Madison Square Garden. Speyer was President & CEO of Tishman Speyer since he formed the company together with his father in law Robert Tishman in 1978. and vice chair on the Board of Trustees of the Rand Corporation. Speyer is on the board of Carnegie Hall, alongside Sanford Weill, the former chairman of Citigroup, with whom he has a close business relationship (see External Links below). His other board affiliations include Siemens AG and the Real Estate Roundtable, and have included Yankee Global Enterprises and the Urban Land Institute. He is a member of the Economic Club of New York and the Council on Foreign Relations. Speyer has sat on the Board of Trustees of NewYork–Presbyterian Hospital since 2000, and has served as President of the Board since 2019, including during the COVID 19 crisis.