Barry Stuart Sternlicht (born November 27, 1960) is an American billionaire and the co-founder (with Bob Faith), chairman, and CEO of Starwood Capital Group, an investment fund with over $100 billion in assets under management.

[9] His father, Maurycy “Mark” Sternlicht, was a plant manager and a Jewish holocaust survivor from Poland [13][14] His mother, Harriet, was from New York and worked as a biology teacher and stockbroker.

[17] In 1991, at the age of 31, with Bob Faith, Sternlicht launched Starwood Capital Group to buy apartment buildings that were being sold by the Resolution Trust Corporation, created by the federal government to hold and liquidate the real estate assets owned by failed banks after the savings and loan crisis.

[2] Sternlicht raised $20 million from the families of William Bernard Ziff Jr. and Carter Burden of New York to fund these purchases.

[22] Barry Sternlicht also makes venture investments out of his family office, JAWS Capital - which has also engaged in three separate SPACs.

[4] In 2007, Sternlicht and then wife Mimi funded a $1 million grant to the Harvard Stem Cell Institute to support research for a cure for diabetes.

[32] In 2024, Sternlicht stopped his donations to Brown University, his alma mater, after the university agreed to hold a board vote addressing student protestors' desire to divest from companies doing business with Israel in the aftermath of the October 7, 2023 attacks on Israel by Hamas and subsequent Israeli military actions in Gaza.

"[35] Following Hamas's attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, a staffer for Sternlicht, at his direction, initiated a long-standing group chat on WhatsApp with some of the United States' most powerful business leaders, with the stated goals of "chang[ing] the narrative" in favor of Israel and "help[ing] win the war" of U.S. public opinion.

[38] The chat, which eventually expanded to approximately 100 members before it was shut down in early May 2024, included former CEO of Starbucks Howard Schultz, Dell founder and CEO Michael Dell, Kind snack company founder Daniel Lubetzky, hedge fund managers Daniel Loeb and Bill Ackman, billionaire Len Blavatnik, real estate investor Joseph Sitt, and Joshua Kushner, the founder of Thrive Capital and brother to Jared Kushner, former president Donald Trump's son-in-law.

[38] Members of the group also held a video call in late April 2024 with New York City Mayor Eric Adams in an effort to, according to reporting by The Washington Post, "pressure Columbia’s president and trustees to permit the mayor to send police to the campus" in order to shut down criticism of Israel's offensive military operations in Gaza, which many campus protesters, intergovernmental and non-governmental organizations, civil servants, and governments around the world have alleged to be genocide.