Tyra Banks and Greg Hayes never worked together, are not related, and have no known public meeting, and this article will not pretend otherwise. Banks is a supermodel who refused to stay a supermodel, building a television empire and then a consumer brand on the strength of her own name. Hayes is a finance executive who climbed quietly through United Technologies for two decades, then merged it with Raytheon to create RTX, one of the largest aerospace and defense companies on earth. One performed in front of cameras from the age of fifteen. The other spent most of his career in rooms where cameras never go. What connects their stories is reinvention: both walked away from the role that made their name and built a bigger one, and both planned their exits instead of waiting to be pushed.
Banks retired from modeling while she was still one of the most recognizable faces in fashion, because she wanted to own the shows instead of appearing in them. Hayes reshaped his company so completely that its old name no longer fit, then handed over the chief executive job in stages he announced in advance. Neither story is about a single talent. Both are about knowing when a chapter has peaked and having the next one ready.
Quick Facts
| Detail | Tyra Banks | Greg Hayes |
|---|---|---|
| Known for | Supermodel who became a television and brand owner | The chief executive who created RTX from United Technologies and Raytheon |
| Born | 4 December 1973, Inglewood, California | 1960 or 1961, United States (exact date not published by authoritative sources) |
| Defining role | Creator and host of America’s Next Top Model | Chairman and CEO of United Technologies, then CEO of RTX |
| Signature achievement | First African American woman on the covers of GQ and the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue | The 2020 merger that formed RTX, and the breakup of the old UTC conglomerate |
| Family | Son York, born 2016; partner Louis Bélanger-Martin | Married; family details kept private |
Who Is Tyra Banks?
Tyra Lynne Banks was born on 4 December 1973 in Inglewood, California. Her mother, Carolyn London, worked as a medical photographer, and her father, Donald Banks, as a computer consultant. She has an older brother, Devin. Her mother was more than a parent in this story: Carolyn managed the early part of her daughter’s career, and the lessons Tyra later built books and brands on came largely from her.
Banks began modeling at fifteen while she was still at school in Los Angeles. The start was not smooth. Agencies turned her down before the work came, a detail she has repeated for years because it shaped how she talks to young models now. When the breakthrough arrived, it arrived at full size.
Banks: The Runway Years
In her first Paris runway season in 1991, Banks was booked for twenty five shows, a record for a newcomer. Through the 1990s she became one of the defining faces of the decade. She was the first African American woman to appear on the covers of GQ and of the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue, a magazine cover she appeared on three times, most recently in 2019 at the age of forty five. From 1997 to 2005 she was one of the original Victoria’s Secret Angels, the most visible modeling job in the world at the time.
She also acted. Her television career began in 1993 on The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, playing Jackie Ames, an old friend of Will Smith’s character. Her film debut followed in Higher Learning in 1995, and she starred as the doll come to life in Life-Size in 2000, a role a generation of viewers still associates with her. In 2005, at the height of her visibility, she retired from modeling. The decision looked like an ending. It was a change of ownership.
Banks: Building the Media Business
In 2003, Banks created America’s Next Top Model, a reality competition she executive produced and hosted. She fronted the show for its first twenty two cycles, through its cancellation in 2015, stayed on as executive producer for its revival, and returned as host for the twenty fourth cycle in 2018. The format sold around the world and turned her from a face into a format owner.
Her daytime talk programme, The Tyra Banks Show, ran from 2005 to 2010 and won the Daytime Emmy Award for outstanding talk show in the informative category in both 2008 and 2009. Behind both shows stood her own company, Bankable Productions, founded as Ty Ty Baby Productions, which produced the talk show, Top Model, and the 2008 film The Clique. The pattern is the point of her career: wherever she appeared, she tried to own a piece of the production too.
Banks the author arrived alongside Banks the producer. Her novel Modelland, published in 2011 and drawn from her modeling years, topped The New York Times Best Seller list. In 2012 she completed the Owner/President Management programme at Harvard Business School, an executive programme for company owners. It is often described loosely as a Harvard degree; it was an executive programme completion, and the distinction matters, because what she took from it was practical, how to run and finance companies she owned.
In 2018 she published Perfect Is Boring, written with her mother Carolyn London, a book of the lessons her mother taught her about beauty, confidence, and work. Its title is her philosophy in three words:
“I’ve always told my Top Model girls that perfect is boring. I got that from my mama.”
Her later hosting years kept her on prime time: she hosted America’s Got Talent in 2017 and 2018, and hosted and executive produced Dancing with the Stars from 2020 to 2022. Each job followed the same rule as her modeling retirement. She was not renting out her face. She was building equity in her own name.
Banks: The Business Chapter
The foundation work came early. In 1999 Banks founded the TZONE Foundation, which ran programmes and camps building self esteem in girls from low income backgrounds, work she has continued in different forms since. The brand building came later, and it leaned on her mother again. SMiZE and Dream, her ice cream company founded in 2020, grew out of childhood Friday nights eating ice cream with Carolyn, and its first shop opened in Santa Monica, California in 2021. The brand, later known for its hot ice cream, is the current centre of her business life, and her partner Louis Bélanger-Martin works in it as chief financial officer.
That is the full arc: model, then host, then owner, then founder. Banks is one of a small group of models who converted a short runway career into a long business one, and she did it by treating her name as a company from the moment she could afford to.
Who Is Greg Hayes?
Gregory J. Hayes, known as Greg Hayes, was born in 1960 or 1961 in the United States. His exact birth date is not given by the authoritative sources for his career, and the conflicting dates on biography websites are not used here. He grew up in Williamsville, New York, graduated from Williamsville South High School in 1978, and played football at Cornell University for a year while studying pre-law. He then transferred to the Krannert School of Management at Purdue University, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in economics in 1982, and he later qualified as a Certified Public Accountant.
Where Banks was famous at fifteen, Hayes was invisible for decades, and deliberately so. His talent was financial: reading a company’s numbers, deciding which businesses belonged together, and doing deals in the right order. It is a skill that rarely makes magazine covers and frequently decides what a company becomes.
Hayes: The Finance Man at United Technologies
After graduating, Hayes joined the Sundstrand Corporation, an aerospace supplier. When United Technologies acquired Sundstrand in 1999, Hayes came with it, beginning a rise through finance, corporate strategy, and business development roles. He served as UTC’s chief financial officer from 2008 to 2014, the years when the company’s shape was being argued about, and in November 2014 he became chief executive, succeeding Louis Chênevert. He was elected chairman in September 2016.
As chief executive he set about ending UTC’s life as a general industrial conglomerate. In 2015 UTC sold its Sikorsky helicopter business to Lockheed Martin. In 2018 it completed its acquisition of Rockwell Collins, creating Collins Aerospace, a giant in aircraft systems. The same period brought the decision to separate the elevator business, Otis, and the climate business, Carrier, from the aerospace core. Each move pointed the same way: UTC would stop being a collection of unrelated industries and become an aerospace company.
Hayes: The Merger That Built RTX
On 9 June 2019, UTC and Raytheon Company announced an all stock merger of equals. The deal closed on 3 April 2020. UTC’s aerospace businesses, Pratt and Whitney, which makes aircraft engines, and Collins Aerospace, combined with Raytheon, the missile and defense systems maker, to form Raytheon Technologies. Otis and Carrier were spun off as separate companies in the same week. Hayes became chief executive of the combined company, with Raytheon’s Thomas Kennedy as executive chairman, and Hayes was elected chairman of the board in 2021. In 2023 the company shortened its name to RTX.
The result was one of the largest aerospace and defense companies in the world, with three businesses that each lead their fields. Mergers of this size often destroy value through culture clashes and debt. This one is generally judged by results: the company Hayes assembled is the company that still stands, and the portfolio logic he imposed at UTC, focus on aerospace, exit everything else, became its permanent shape.
Hayes: The Planned Exit
Hayes’s departure was as methodical as his deals. He retired as chief executive on 2 May 2024, succeeded by Christopher Calio, and moved to executive chairman. In February 2025 RTX announced the final step: Hayes would step down as executive chairman on 30 April 2025, Calio would add the chairman role, and Hayes would serve as a special advisor to the chief executive through 2 January 2026.
His board work continues elsewhere. In March 2025 he joined the board of BD, the medical technology company Becton, Dickinson and Company. He also serves on the board of Phillips 66 and as chairman of the board of NAF, the National Academy Foundation, an education network. The accountant who spent twenty years inside one company now lends that experience to several, which is a common final act for a chief executive whose reputation is built on portfolio judgment rather than personal publicity.
Two Worlds, No Connection
There is no documented connection between Tyra Banks and Greg Hayes. No shared company, deal, investment, programme, or meeting appears in any reliable record, and the pairing of their names in searches does not create one. Banks’s world is fashion, television, and consumer brands. Hayes’s world is aerospace, defense, and corporate finance. Neither biography touches the other.
The honest parallel is method. Both built a system out of a personal skill. Banks turned what she knew about the camera into teachable method, her word for smiling with the eyes, smize, entered everyday language, and into formats and companies she owned. Hayes turned what he knew about numbers into portfolio discipline, applied first to UTC’s sprawl and then to the largest merger in his industry. Both also handled succession personally: Banks retired from modeling at her peak and announced each reinvention herself, while Hayes published his own retirement timetable years of work in advance and stuck to it. Reinvention, done on schedule, is the shared story. It is a comparison, not a connection.
Personal Lives
Banks has never married. Her son, York Banks Asla, was born in January 2016 through a gestational surrogate, during her relationship with the photographer Erik Asla; the relationship ended in 2017. She keeps her son out of her public work, and no photograph of him belongs in an article like this one. Since about 2019 her partner has been Louis Bélanger-Martin, a Canadian businessman who has run in flight entertainment companies and co founded an investment firm, and who works as chief financial officer of her ice cream company. In an April 2025 television appearance Banks called him super supportive, one of the few personal comments she has made about the relationship. Her closest documented collaborator across her whole life remains her mother, Carolyn London, her early manager, the co author of Perfect Is Boring, and the inspiration for her ice cream brand.
Hayes’s personal life is documented only in outline in mainstream sources: he is married, and his wife and family are not named in the major profiles of his career. For the man who ran one of the largest defense companies in the world, that privacy is complete, and this article reports the outline rather than decorating it with detail no reliable source supports.
What They Share, and What They Do Not
They share a second act bigger than the first, a system built from a personal skill, and exits planned in advance. Both are also, in different ways, teachers: Banks spent two decades instructing young models on camera and wrote her mother’s lessons into a book, while Hayes’s later career is board work, advising companies and an education foundation rather than running a line business himself.
They do not share visibility. Banks is one of the most photographed people of her generation, with a face that sold magazines on several continents. Hayes can be the former head of a company employing hundreds of thousands and still walk through an airport unrecognized, and every sign is that he prefers it. She built a brand out of being seen. He built a company out of being exact. Both converted a talent into an institution, which is why their names carry weight in rooms the other will never enter.
What Is Known and What Is Not Public
| Known and confirmed | Not public or not verified |
|---|---|
| Banks was the first African American woman on the covers of GQ and the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue | Any meeting, deal, or relationship between Banks and Hayes, for which no evidence exists |
| Banks completed Harvard Business School’s Owner/President Management executive programme in 2012 | Claims that Banks holds a Harvard degree or MBA, which the record does not support |
| Hayes led UTC from 2014 and created RTX through the April 2020 Raytheon merger | Hayes’s exact birth date, which authoritative sources give only as 1960 or 1961 |
| Hayes stepped down as RTX executive chairman on 30 April 2025 and joined BD’s board in March 2025 | Hayes’s family details beyond the fact that he is married |
| Net worth figures for either person are excluded from this article | Reported net worth numbers, which are estimates that swing by source and date |
Frequently Asked Questions
Who is Tyra Banks?
Tyra Banks is an American model, television personality, producer, author, and businesswoman, born on 4 December 1973 in Inglewood, California. She was one of the defining supermodels of the 1990s and a Victoria’s Secret Angel from 1997 to 2005, then created and hosted America’s Next Top Model and hosted The Tyra Banks Show, which won two Daytime Emmy Awards. She now runs businesses including her ice cream company SMiZE and Dream.
Who is Greg Hayes?
Greg Hayes is an American business executive, born in 1960 or 1961, best known as the longtime leader of United Technologies and the first chief executive of RTX. A Purdue economics graduate and Certified Public Accountant, he became UTC’s chief executive in 2014, merged its aerospace businesses with Raytheon in April 2020 to form what is now RTX, and retired as chief executive in May 2024. He stepped down as executive chairman in April 2025 and serves on other boards, including BD and Phillips 66.
Are Tyra Banks and Greg Hayes connected?
No. There is no documented relationship, business deal, or meeting between them. Banks built her career in fashion, television, and consumer brands, while Hayes spent his in aerospace and corporate finance. This article compares them because both reinvented themselves and planned their transitions carefully, not because of any link between them.
What did Greg Hayes do at United Technologies?
He dismantled it, carefully, and kept the strongest part. As chief financial officer from 2008 to 2014 and then chief executive, Hayes sold the Sikorsky helicopter business, bought Rockwell Collins to create Collins Aerospace, and separated the Otis and Carrier businesses. He then merged UTC’s aerospace units with Raytheon in April 2020, creating Raytheon Technologies, renamed RTX in 2023, and led it until 2024.
Did Tyra Banks go to Harvard?
She completed an executive programme there. In 2012 Banks finished the Owner/President Management programme at Harvard Business School, a programme designed for company owners and presidents. It is sometimes reported as a Harvard degree, but it was an executive education programme, not a degree, and Banks attended it to learn how to run the companies she already owned.
What is Tyra Banks doing now?
Her main business focus is SMiZE and Dream, the ice cream company she founded in 2020, inspired by Friday night ice cream with her mother, with her partner Louis Bélanger-Martin as its chief financial officer. She remains a producer and television personality, and her mother Carolyn London, co author of their 2018 book Perfect Is Boring, remains her closest documented collaborator.
Conclusion
Tyra Banks and Greg Hayes never met, as far as any record shows, and nothing in either career needs the other to make sense. Read side by side, though, they make the same point from opposite ends of public life. A career is not a single role. Banks left the runway at her peak and owned the next stage instead. Hayes took apart the company that employed him and built a focused giant from its best pieces, then left on a timetable he announced himself. Perfect is boring, her mother taught her. Hayes’s whole career says the corporate version: a comfortable shape is not the same as the right one.
