Silverman was born in Brooklyn in 1940; his father was the chief executive of a commercial finance firm. Silverman completed his undergraduate degree at Williams College in 1961 and went on to complete his J.D. at the University of Pennsylvania Law School in 1964. He served in the United States Navy Reserves for several years, and had a varied career in law and investment banking before founding Hospitality Franchise Systems (HFS), which later merged with CUC International to form Cendant Corporation. Silverman has been married three times and has four children.

Early Career

Silverman’s early career consisted of stints as an assistant, investment banker, and entrepreneur. Throughout the late 1960s and 1970s, he pursued several entrepreneurial ventures, but he didn’t achieve significant professional success until 1984, when he joined the insurance company, Reliance Group Holdings. While at Reliance, Silverman acquired the American hotel chain, Days Inn, in a $590 million transaction, which reportedly earned him $125 million in profit.

In 1986, Silverman became president and CEO of Telemundo, the Spanish-language television network, which he led until 1990. He worked briefly as a partner at the private equity firm, Blackstone Group, and then left to head Hospitality Franchise Systems (HFS), an investment of Blackstone’s that he had overseen.

HFS and Cendant Corporation

Under Silverman’s leadership, HFS acquired multiple hotel franchises, including the Ramada, Howard Johnson’s, and Days Inn. With the latter franchise, Silverman orchestrated a buyout of $290 million, about half of what it had gone for in the deal he brokered at Reliance.

In 1992, HFS launched an IPO and became one of the fastest-growing companies of its size. By 1998, the company’s stock had risen from its IPO price of $4 to $77 per share.

In 1997, Silverman led a $14 billion merger of HFS and CUC, a direct marketing company, which resulted in the establishment of Cendant Corporation. Under his leadership as CEO and Chairman, Cendant was named a Fortune 100 company and became the largest global provider of consumer and business services in the travel and residential real estate industries. Shareholder value increased by more than 2000%.

Among some of the acquisitions led by Silverman are AmeriHost Inn, Super 8, Travelodge, Avis Rent a Car System, Budget Rent a Car, Coldwell Banker, Century 21 Real Estate, Sotheby’s International Realty, and Orbitz Worldwide.

In 2006, Silverman masterminded a plan to separate Cendant into several smaller, independent companies. Its real estate brokerage division, Realogy, was sold to Apollo Global Management; its travel distribution services division, Travelport, was sold to The Blackstone Group; its hospitality services division became a separate company, Wyndham Worldwide, and its car rental services division renamed itself Avis Budget Group.

In February 2009, Silverman became COO of Apollo Global Management, and in 2012, he became Vice Chairman of Asset Management at Guggenheim Partners, a New York-based private equity firm.

Board Leadership

Silverman has held leadership positions on the board of trustees of the New York University School of Medicine and the NYU Health System, the NYU Langone Medical Center, the NYU Child Study Center, the University of Pennsylvania, Penn Medicine, the Dance Theatre of Harlem, and the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Notable Investments

In the early 2010s, Silverman invested several million dollars in Droga5, a privately held New York agency with a client list that included Microsoft, Coca-Cola, and Kraft Foods.

In the News

Despite Silverman’s penchant for staying out of the headlines, in 1997, Time Magazine published a piece on his leadership of HFS.

In 1998, Silverman gifted $15 million to the University of Pennsylvania Law School, the largest outright gift to an American law school at the time.