(Photo: Mark Lennihan/AP (MTA Employee); Superstock (Doctor and Business Man))

New York’s Largest Employers
One easy way to measure influence is the number of people who depend on you for a paycheck. Almost 8 percent of the people who live here work for the city’s top-ten employers:

(1.) City of New York
Mayor: Michael Bloomberg
NYC employees = 450,000

(2.) New York-Presbyterian Healthcare System
CEO: Herbert Pardes
NYC employees = 28,909

(3.) Citigroup
CEO: Charles Prince
NYC employees = 26,809

(4.) JPMorgan Chase
CEO: Jamie Dimon
NYC employees = 20,883

(5.) Verizon Communications
Chairman, CEO: Ivan Seidenberg
NYC employees = 17,622

(6.) Federated Department Stores
Chairman, president, CEO: Terry Lundgren
NYC employees = 17,000

(7.) Continuum Health Partners
President, CEO: Stanley Brezenoff
NYC employees = 15,592

(8.) Columbia University
President: Lee Bollinger
NYC employees = 13,151

(9.) Time Warner
Chairman, CEO: Richard Parsons NYC employees = 12,890

(10.) North Shore-Long Island Jewish Health System
President, CEO: Michael Dowling
NYC employees = 12,857

The CEOs Who Matter Most
From Fairfield, Connecticut, General Electric’s Jeffrey Immelt rules a $150 billion–sales behemoth, from jet engines to King Kong. Hank McKinnell reigns over Pfizer’s array of blockbuster drugs like Zoloft and Viagra. Corporate-card king Kenneth Chenault, who has enjoyed four years of double-digit sales growth at American Express, has been mentioned as a possible Treasury secretary. In Forest Hills, David Neeleman’s JetBlue, which revolutionized the wheezing airline industry, though rising fuel costs have led to losses in two straight quarters. And Verizon Communications’s Ivan Seidenberg is betting billions upgrading to a fiber-optic network as he takes on his cable rivals in the battle for home-Internet dominance.