Gary Barnett

If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you … then you might be Gary Barnett.

During the Global Financial Crisis in 2008 — when the entire financial world was rapidly imploding — there was one figure who stood before the panicky hordes and calmly made a counterintuitive move: Let’s build a luxury condo.

And not just a luxury condo, mind you. Something tall. Something that reaches more than 1,000 feet into the sky. Let’s make sure that the property has a starchitect attached (Christian de Portzamparc), let’s attach a luxury hotel to the bottom floors (Grand Hyatt), and let’s charge buyers a wildly high premium.

More than $1 billion in sales later, Barnett looked like a genius.

Of course, it wasn’t just the daring of One57 (the name of the aforementioned condo tower) that earned him a place on this list, or the fact that the building popularized the term Billionaires’ Row. Nor was it Barnett’s other project on 57th Street — Central Park Tower — or the various flags he’s planted in Brooklyn, Two Bridges, Hell’s Kitchen or the Upper West Side.

Let’s just say the man is an innovator — and he has the courage of his convictions. He has set the standard for Manhattan luxury, and he keeps upping the stakes.

Barnett is not all residential condo development. Extell has quietly been chipping away on a new fancy office project at 570 Fifth Avenue (apparently in talks to nab law firm Simpson Thacher as a tenant) and it’s also been in talks to sell a retail condo at 655 Madison Avenue with Chanel for an ungodly $455 million. 

But Barnett has not lost his flair for the grandiose or the residential. This summer Extell quietly filed plans to demolish the former Walt Disney-owned ABC campus on Manhattan’s Upper West Side — a site which Barnett paid $931 million for back in 2022. What he’s planning is still very much unknown, but we should expect something tall, something residential and something extremely expensive. We can’t wait.