Jim Jacoby is an Atlanta real estate developer who isn’t afraid to bet big. He made his bones in the 1970s building strip malls and Walmarts. Then in the middle 1990s he undertook a mammoth, multi-year project turning an abandoned Atlanta steel mill into a $2 billion retail, residential and office complex called Atlantic Station. Financing for the sprawling deal nearly crashed when the stock market collapsed in 2000.

Then there was the great Atlanta real estate die-off of  2008. Jacoby, now 71, however managed to survive, along the way honing specialties in eco-friendly projects and redevelopment of brownfield sites. Recently, for instance, Porsche opened the doors on the swank new U.S. headquarters near Atlanta’s Hartsfield Jackson International Airport that Jacoby developed for them on the site of an old Ford Taurus plant.

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