Eli Broad never met a schedule he couldn't love...A newshound who built two Fortune 500 companies and a multibillion-dollar fortune, Broad (rhymes with road) whizzes through the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and the Los Angeles Times each morning before most people can conquer a double cappuccino. He rarely slows down to finish a story, unless, as someone close to him puts it, "it's about him."

But it's "about him" so often these days that just keeping up with himself threatens to throw Broad completely off schedule. One of the richest (net worth $5.8 billion), most powerful (as much clout as the mayor), and most philanthropic men in Los Angeles (and the nation), Broad is a blunt force in business, the arts, education reform, and politics. He is the city's leading cultural rainmaker, the major mover behind its $1.8 billion downtown redevelopment, and a powerful liberal Democrat who really can make things happen simply by picking up the phone...

Now, as chairman of the $1.8 billion Grand Avenue Project, Broad is out to manufacture the "downtown" he believes L.A. is missing. The Gehry-designed project, with its wide sidewalks, shops, theaters, restaurants, office towers, five-star hotel, and 16-acre park, is intended to be to the city what the Champs-Elysées (aka the Champs Eli) is to Paris. "Los Angeles is divided culturally and geographically, and it needs a vibrant center where everyone can come together," says Broad, who adds that L.A.'s vastness unnerved him when he first moved here in the 1960s because he didn't understand it. Some critics think he still doesn't.

"Eli has this notion that a great city must have a dynamic downtown, and that's what a city lives by," says Joel Kotkin of the New America Foundation in Washington, D.C., and author of The City: A Global History. "Yet he has been living in one of the greatest cities in the world, and it's the exact opposite. L.A. is a multipolar city, and the notion that you can create New York in the middle of it without understanding the context is a mistake. He's in denial."

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