How the richest actor in the world zoomed ahead of wealthy stars like Tom Cruise, Brad Pitt and Jennifer Lopez
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She has amassed a fortune over the years that is multiple times the size of several of the wealthiest Hollywood stars' net worths.
And her path to unimaginable wealth would seem simple enough, since she's married to a multi-billionaire businessman who founded multiple private-equity firms.
But, according to Jami Gertz, she acquired her own multi-billion-dollar fortune thanks to her and her husband's ingenuity, as she was making more money than he was when they first met in the 1980s.
The 59-year-old Twister actress is worth around $8 billion now, according to Celebrity Net Worth, which makes her far wealthier than some of Hollywood biggest stars, including Tom Cruise, Brad Pitt and Jennifer Lopez.
Gertz's riches even exceeds that of other famously wealthy artists, like Taylor Swift, who is worth $1.6 billion after the success of her Eras Tour, and Steven Spielberg, who blockbuster films and enviable contracts have made him worth around $5.3 billion.
As Gertz explains it, she put her lucrative acting career on the back burner after getting married and focused on joining her husband Tony Ressler — worth $10.9 billion, according to Forbes — in making high-profile business deals.
In a 2018 Hollywood Reporter profile, Lost Boys star clarified that her ascent to the ranks of the ultra-wealth wasn't as simple as just marrying into wealth.
'Everyone thinks I married a rich guy,' she said. 'But I made more money — way more money — than Tony when I met him.
'I paid for our first house. I paid for our first vacation,' she continued. 'I married him because I fell in love with him.'
Gertz's publicist put her in touch with Ressler, who was working at the investment bank Drexel Burnham Lambert, which would file for bankruptcy in 1990 due to illegal junk bond trading.
At the time, Gertz was starring with her Lost Boys costar Jason Patric in a small play 'about two people committing suicide every night.'
In the same profile, Ressler said he didn't know much about his future wife at the time, other than that she was a 'working actress,' and he wasn't even familiar with the films and TV shows she had made up to that point.
But the connection was instantaneous for the two, though Gertz joked that her family might have preferred it if she had married 'a doctor or a lawyer.'
Gertz would go on to have high-profile success alongside some of the biggest stars of the 1980s and beyond.
In 1987, she appeared in Less Than Zero with Brat Pack members Robert Downey Jr. and Andrew McCarthy, and The Lost Boys, which had an ensemble cast of rising stars including Patric, Keifer Sutherland, Corey Haim and Corey Feldman.
One of her biggest roles in the '90s was a supporting part as the fiancée of Bill Paxton's character in Twister (1996), and she later focused on television in the next two decades with a lead role on CBS' sitcom Still Standing and ABC's sci-fi comedy The Neighbors.
But Gertz's roles have become rarer in recent years, and she hasn't been credited in anything after 2022's rom-com I Want You Back, which starred Charlie Day and Jenny Slate.
In place of acting, she has increasingly followed her husband's lead into business. Ressler made the move to Los Angeles in the late '80s to support his wife's acting career, but after co-founding the private-equity firm Apollo Global in 1990, followed by Ares Management in 1997, he quickly eclipsed her earnings.
Gertz was inspired in 2010 to create her own production company, Lime Orchard Productions, which gave her a new income stream just as roles were becoming scarcer.
'You reach an age, and you slow down, and the jobs are a little hard to come by,' she said of acting.
But Lime Orchard turned out to be a false start, as it was large unsuccessful, with only the 2011 film A Better Life counting as a success after it earned its star Demian Bichir an Oscar nomination.
According to Gertz, she flushed away millions of dollars on the failed production company.
Her next move was to focus on building connections with wealthy industry figures in Hollywood, such as Disney CEO Bob Iger, who was a guest at some of her opulent holiday parties.
Around that time, Ressler began itching to control his own sports teams.
The two went on to join Mark Attanasio's investment group to buy a baseball team, the Milwaukee Brewers.
Then Ressler, a Los Angeles Lakers superfan, decided they should buy an NBA team.
He and Gertz first attempted to snatch up the Los Angeles Clippers after former owner Donald Sterling's racist scandal forced a sale, though Steve Ballmer was ultimately triumphant.
They got a second chance in 2015, when they won an auction for a controlling stake in the Atlanta Hawks after a similar racist scandal forced the sale.
After becoming owners of the Hawks, Gertz and Ressler built a 90,000-square-foot training compound and sports medicine center for the team's use at Emory University.
They also renovated the team's arena, but like many other pro sports team owners, they convinced taxpayers to foot the vast majority of the bill — around $142.5 million — while they and their fellow investors only had to pay $50 million, even though they stood to earn the most from the team's success.
Since taking over the team, Gertz's acting history made her a logical choice to be the public face of the duo, while Ressler could continue working behind the scenes.
Now that the couple have joined the ranks of the ultra-wealthy, they have also became major philanthropists.
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