A venerable vulture investor, Ross is the billionaire chairman and CEO of W.L. Ross & Co. and a veteran of the distressed investing community.

The son of a lawyer and schoolteacher, Ross grew up in a well-to-do suburban New Jersey family and attended Yale, his father's alma mater. As an undergrad, Ross worked on the campus literary magazine and says he initially considered a career as a writer. He quickly wised up and turned his attention to finance, attending Harvard Business School before landing at Rothschild in the mid-1970s. Ross spent a quarter-century at the firm and established himself as one of the most prominent bankruptcy advisers in the country. Itching to jump into the fray himself, in the late 1990s he moved beyond traditional advisory assignments, launching a $200 million distressed private-equity fund for Rothschild. When the conflicts between advising clients and investing the fund's money grew too great, the sixty something veteran went solo, launching W.L. Ross & Co. with $440 million in capital and a small staff he'd recruited from Rothschild.

Ross' fund got off the ground on April Fools' Day in 2000 and his timing turned out to be fortuitous: The wave of bankruptcies that followed Sept. 11 and the collapse of the tech market ended up minting a fortune for Ross as he made big bets on forgotten businesses in the industrial heartland like steel, coal mines and textile mills. In 2003, the tenacious investor completed his biggest coup, rolling up a collection of steel companies into International Steel Group; he later sold the company to Mittal Steel for $4.5 billion in 2004, netting himself a quarter-billion payday in the process. He followed up with a similar rollup in the textile industry, and then moved on to the coal industry and auto parts sectors. While continuing to make a fortune, the investor took some heat in 2006 after a dozen miners died in a tragic mishap at the Sago mine, which is owned by his International Coal Group.

In 2006, Ross sold his firm to British money management giant AMVESCAP in a deal valued at around $375 million. He remains at the helm of the firm, though, and has since taken control of AMVESCAP's Invesco Private Capital unit; in total, he now oversees more than $7 billion across 15 different funds and in recent months he's been busy investing aggressively in the wake of the subprime mortgage meltdown. In March 2008, Ross purchased H&R Block's troubled mortgage servicing business for $1.1 billion. (He picked up the unit after a deal to sell it to Steve Feinberg's Cerberus Capital Management fell through.) The purchase came on the heels of W.L. Ross's agreement to purchase $42 billion in mortgage servicing rights from American Home Mortgage Investment Corp. Ross's net worth was estimated at $1.8 billion by Forbes in 2008.

Ross married his third wife, socialite Hilary Geary, in 2005. With his first wife, Judith, he has two daughters, Jessica and Amanda. His second wife was former New York Lt. Governor Betsy McCaughey Ross, whom he divorced in 1998. Ross and Geary live on West 57th Street; they purchased a 14-room prewar from Andrew Farkas for $18.9 million in 2007. The tennis-playing billionaire spends weekends at his Bunny Williams-decorated mansion in Palm Beach. The couple paid $9 million for the 10,000-square-foot mansion in 2003.

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