He is one of two founding partners of the New York real estate company Tishman Speyer, which controls Rockefeller Center.
[2] 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.
[8] 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).
In 1987, they divorced (Lynn later married Harold R. Handler, who is retired as a senior partner in the New York law firm of Simpson Thacher & Bartlett).
She served as manager of new business development for East Asia and the Pacific for Turner International Industries before joining Tishman Speyer in 1984.
She is a vice president of the Brearley School, and a member of the Board and Executive Committee of the Alvin Ailey Dance Foundation.