One is a real estate developer, the other an actor who also built a hospitality business. They never worked together. The New York that made them both is now much harder to break into.
Jerry Speyer and Robert De Niro built two of New York’s biggest fortunes without ever doing business together. Speyer, the developer behind Tishman Speyer, controls Rockefeller Center and is now negotiating for the Chrysler Building. De Niro, the actor behind Nobu and the Tribeca Festival, is preparing to open the first Nobu hotel in New York, decades after his restaurants helped remake lower Manhattan. The two have no shared deal on record. What they have in common is a city, an era, and a path to the top that has narrowed since they climbed it.
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Who is Jerry Speyer?
Speyer’s story starts with a father who got out of Germany in time. Ernst Speyer fled Frankfurt in 1939, made shoes for a living, and moved the family to New York by way of Milwaukee. Jerry studied German literature at Columbia, finished an MBA in 1964, and took a junior job at Madison Square Garden. In 1978 he and Robert Tishman, his wife’s father, started the real estate firm that still carries both their names.
Tishman Speyer became one of the largest property companies in the world. It controls Rockefeller Center and, by the firm’s own count, has developed and managed real estate valued at about $81.9 billion. Speyer has appeared on the Forbes 400 list of the richest Americans and chaired both the Museum of Modern Art and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. His son Rob became chief executive in 2015, while Jerry stayed on as chairman.
The firm’s current target is the Chrysler Building. Bloomberg reported in April 2026 that Tishman Speyer had entered exclusive talks for a ground lease on the tower that would run more than a hundred years. Asked about it by Commercial Observer in February, Rob Speyer played it down. “I prefer to focus on the deals we’ve done, not rumors in the market,” he said.
What Robert De Niro built off screen
Most people know Robert De Niro from the movies. What connects him to someone like Speyer is what he did with the money.
De Niro grew up in Greenwich Village and Little Italy, the son of two painters. His father, the artist Robert De Niro Sr., came out as gay and left when Robert was two, and his mother raised him in a downtown that was cheap and full of working artists. Years later, he would turn that same downtown into a business.
He started TriBeCa Productions with Jane Rosenthal in 1989. After the September 11 attacks, the two launched the Tribeca Film Festival to draw people back to lower Manhattan. He opened the Greenwich Hotel in 2008 and the restaurant Locanda Verde inside it the following year. And in 1994, after the chef Nobu Matsuhisa turned him down once and agreed the second time, the first Nobu opened on a Tribeca corner. Bloomberg now puts the value of the Nobu restaurant and hotel business at around $900 million.
Nobu keeps growing. Its first New York hotel is set to open this year in the former Plaza Athรฉnรฉe on the Upper East Side. De Niro also has two films due in 2026, the Netflix thriller The Whisper Man on August 28 and the Meet the Parents sequel Focker In-Law in November.
Do Jerry Speyer and Robert De Niro have a connection?
Not a direct one. There is no record of the two partnering on a building, a restaurant, or anything else, and they do not turn up together in business filings or society pages.
What ties them together is the city and the timing. Both started as outsiders, one the son of a refugee, the other the son of artists with little money. Each spent decades making his corner of Manhattan far more valuable than he found it. And in 2026, both in their eighties, the two are still expanding, in a New York that has changed under them.
How the two compare
| Jerry Speyer | Robert De Niro | |
|---|---|---|
| Age in 2026 | 86 | 82 |
| Best known for | Tishman Speyer, Rockefeller Center | Acting, Nobu, the Tribeca Festival |
| Background | Son of a refugee shoemaker from Frankfurt | Son of two Greenwich Village painters |
| New York holdings | Office towers, Rockefeller Center | Greenwich Hotel, Nobu, Locanda Verde |
| 2026 development | Chrysler Building lease talks | First Nobu hotel in New York |
| Money | On the Forbes 400 list | Nobu business valued near $900M, per Bloomberg |
Where both stand in 2026
A few dates that put the year in order:
- January 1, 2026: Zohran Mamdani is sworn in as New York’s mayor after running on higher taxes for the city’s wealthiest residents.
- April 2026: Bloomberg reports Tishman Speyer is in exclusive talks for a ground lease on the Chrysler Building.
- June 2026: The Tribeca Festival, which De Niro launched in 2002, holds its 25th edition.
- Later in 2026: Nobu’s first New York hotel is due to open at the former Plaza Athรฉnรฉe, and De Niro’s two new films reach audiences.
The New York that made them is harder to enter now
New York’s politics shifted under both men this year. Mamdani won City Hall on a plan to raise taxes on the city’s wealthiest residents, the group Speyer sits squarely within as a billionaire developer holding Rockefeller Center and chasing the Chrysler Building. He has said nothing publicly about the new mayor, which fits a man who rarely speaks to the press at all.
De Niro is far more political, though his focus has been Washington rather than City Hall. He has criticized Donald Trump for years, and before this year’s State of the Union he said on air, “He will never leave. We have to make him leave.” His businesses, though, run at the top of the market. In late 2024 he opened a second Locanda Verde inside 50 Hudson Yards, the tower that houses BlackRock, the largest money manager in the world. Its walls hold paintings by his father, who spent his life making art downtown and died in 1993 with little money to his name.
The path that carried both men to the top has mostly closed. Ernst Speyer arrived with a trade and almost nothing, and within one generation his family controlled some of the most valuable land in the country. Matsuhisa looked at Tribeca in 1989, saw a place not worth his time, and later watched it turn into one of the most expensive neighborhoods in America. A newcomer with the same drive would have a hard time repeating either climb today. The city that rewarded Speyer and De Niro is, in part, a city they helped price out of reach.
