Working World

In 2007, Sheldon Adelson was #3 on Forbes’ list of the 400 Richest Americans, right behind his more famous fellow billionaires, William Gates III and Warren Buffet. Adelson had $28 billion that year. He’s plummeted to #12 in 2008 as his fortune — made in property development, hotels and casinos — has dwindled to a paltry $15 billion.

The New York Times attributes this to Wall Street investors becoming “more bearish” about casinos being built in Asia, a market where Adelson has invested heavily. The 74-year-old entrepreneur is weathering the setback well, however, and despite his losses and some health problems, continues to expand his companies aggressively.

In 2008, he opened a new tower at his luxurious Venetian Hotel in Las Vegas, making it the largest hotel in the world, with 7,200 rooms, 20 restaurants, a shopping mall built around a canal complete with gondolas and over two million square feet of exhibition and meeting space.

Adelson grew up poor in a rough neighborhood in Boston, son of Jewish immigrants from Ukraine and Lithuania. His father was a cab driver. Sheldon was selling newspapers by age 12 and later worked in the mortgage industry and sold toiletry kits to hotels. In the 1960s he started a charter tour company with two old friends from Boston. But his big break came when he founded the Comdex computer show in 1979, selling space to vendors eager to exhibit their computer products in the booming 1980s. Comdex, which became the premier computer trade show in the ’80s and ’90s, catapulted him into the ranks of the very rich.

Adelson and his partners bought the Sands Hotel and Casino in 1988, formerly the hang-out of Frank Sinatra and his friends, for $128 million, and built the Sands Expo and Convention Center next to it, keeping their focus on the convention business rather than gambling. Then they sold Comdex to a Japanese firm in 1995 for $862 million; Adelson’s share was half a billion dollars.

Despite being in his 60s by this time, Adelson still wanted to do bigger projects. He demolished the Sands Hotel and built the Venetian on the site, developing it as a huge integrated convention-centered resort. It cost $1.5 billion dollars and is the second most profitable casino-hotel on the Las Vegas Strip (after Steve Wynn’s Bellagio).

But even that wasn’t enough. His company, the Las Vegas Sands, which went public in 2004, is running two gambling resorts on the Chinese island of Macau and is involved in building another dozen hotels there, as well as one in Singapore. One of his long-time executives has called Adelson “a guy who’s obsessed.” He has also been called by others “querulous” and “enormously difficult.” He is often involved in disputes and lawsuits and, by his own admission, has a “limited patience quota.”

Although raised in a working class Democratic family, Adelson became a Republican as he grew wealthier. He is a strong financial supporter of conservative causes and in 2007 founded the lobbying group Freedom’s Watch, which advocates continued involvement in the Iraq war.

He and his wife, physician Miriam Adelson, fund a foundation that supports medical research, seeking methods to prevent, reduce or cure cancer and immunologic and neurologic diseases. Adelson himself suffers from peripheral neuropathy, a disorder of the nervous system. The Adelsons live in Las Vegas.

Suzanne Ridgway is a freelance writer and regular columnist for Working World and Working Nurse magazines. She also writes grant proposals for nonprofit organizations.

1 COMMENTS

• Ron Assaf

  I love stories about survivors and winners. My sister in New Orleans is Marketing Drector at a Senior Citizen's Health Insurance Plan. One of their "Champions" is 94 years old and says she still knits every day, and stays Happy and alert with her positive attitude. "What's the use of worrying? Most of the things you worry abot never happen anyway."

  Jan 08, 2009