Henry R. Silverman photographed at his office in New York City.
On the morning of April 19, the private-equity firm Apollo Management acquired Realogy--the company behind real estate brokerages Coldwell Banker, Century 21 and ERA. It was not, by modern standards, a huge transaction: the sale price was $8.5 billion, nowhere near the $39 billion that private-equity titan Blackstone Group recently paid for Equity Offices Trust.
Realogy's passage into private ownership was nonetheless a landmark--because it marked the end of chief executive Henry Silverman's career as boss of a publicly traded corporation. Silverman, 66, is no household name, but he may be one of the iconic figures of modern American capitalism. Either...
