As bad a year as Rahm had at the power table, Pritzker seemed to turn over all aces. In October, the billionaire financier burnished his philanthropic rep by dropping a cool $100 million to support scholarships at Northwestern University’s law school, the largest gift ever to a U.S. law school. The ice-skating ribbon in Maggie Daley Park? That’s J.B. (and his wife) too. A longtime Hillary Clinton backer—he served as her national cochairman in ’08—Pritzker remains one of her biggest campaign bundlers. Over the past year, his firm Pritzker Group Private Capital snatched up three Chicago-area companies, and, for a mic drop, he won Ernst & Young’s Master Entrepreneur of the Year Award.

Power Quote “I’ve learned way more from failures than I have from successes.”

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