Who

Naftali is the CEO of Elad Properties, the U.S. arm of a rapidly expanding real estate development firm headquartered in Israel. He's best known for turning the Plaza into high-priced condos.

Backstory

Israel native Naftali was educated at USC and ran his own real estate firm before joining Elad in 2001. Today, he oversees a real estate portfolio worth some $10 billion on behalf of Elad Properties, a subsidiary of Israeli billionaire Yitzhak Tshuva's holding company, the Elad Group. The company first generated attention in 2004, when it acquired the Plaza Hotel for $675 million and then announced plans to renovate the property and turn it into condos. But Elad has been involved in a number of other conversions over the years. In 2003, it acquired 21 Astor (the building above the Starbucks at Astor Place) and converted its units into condos; the company did much the same with the O'Neill Building in Chelsea (which houses Bed Bath & Beyond) and the Grand Madison on lower Fifth Avenue. Most recently, Elad unveiled its first new construction, the Costas Kondylis-designed Link on West 52nd Street, although the opening was marred by reports of construction delays.

Of note

Elad became The Plaza's eighth owner when it acquired the building from the Saudi Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal. (Other owners have included Robert Bass, the brother of Sid Bass, Donald Trump, and the Hilton family.) When Elad announced that it planned to convert the hotel—one of New York's most famous pieces of architecture—into high-priced condos, many nostalgic New Yorkers, not to mention preservation officials and union officials, were up in arms and complaining that the move would alter a historic structure and eliminate hundreds of jobs.

Led by hotel union leader Peter Ward, opponents of the conversion successfully persuaded Mayor Bloomberg to intervene and in 2005, a compromise was reached which ensured that half the rooms would remain part of the hotel. (Elad subsequently sold the hotel portion of the property back to Bin Talal, who will manage it as part of his Fairmont Hotels chain.) Since then, the company has attracted a long-list of big shot buyers: Jimmy Cayne, Harry Macklowe, Jocelyne Wildenstein, and Tommy Hilfiger have all paid mammoth sums to claim a piece of the building.

The Plaza isn't the only big project on Elad's agenda. In 2007, it paid $1.2 billion for prime real estate on the Las Vegas Strip, acquiring the site occupied by the New Frontier Hotel and Casino, which Elad plans to turn into a new $5 billion hotel called the Plaza. The company's also planning to leverage the Plaza name with hotel developments in a dozen other cities including LA, San Francisco, London, Paris, Rome, Tokyo and Shanghai. In New York, Elad is in the initial stages of building a residential high rise designed by Daniel Libeskind at the southeast corner of Madison Square Park.

For the record

If you've seen the name of the company spelled several different ways in the papers, well, take your pick. Elad's own website alternately refers to the company as "Elad," "El Ad," and "El-Ad." The word means "Eternal God" in Hebrew.

Personal

Miki—whose real name is Michael—is married to Frieda Nafali. They live in New Jersey.