Sheldon Adelson
Sheldon G. Adelson was born 1933 in the Dorchester section of Boston. His Ukrainian-born mother and his Lithuanian-born father from had both fled the Russian empire. His father worked as a taxicab driver.
Forbes magazine currently ranks Adelson as the 3rd richest American, and the sixth richest man in the world, with an estimated net worth of 26.5 billion dollars. Mr. Adelson got his start in capitalism by selling the Boston Globe on street corners.
He studied briefly at City College of New York, but dropped out before completing his degree. In the years that followed, he worked as a mortgage broker, investment adviser and financial consultant. He made and lost fortunes in venture capital and real estate before finding phenomenal success in the trade show business.
Sheldon Adelson has founded and grown more than fifty different successful companies, including Computer Dealers Expo tradeshow (COMDEX), which he created with his partners in 1979, with the goal of bringing more visitors to his hotels.
He sold the Interface Group Show Division, including the COMDEX shows, to Softbank Corporation of Japan for a cash price of $862 million.
In 1988, Adelson and his partners purchased the Sands Hotel & Casino in Las Vegas, Nevada, for $128 million. The following year, he demolished the Sands, and set to work on the construction of the $1.5-billion Venetian, a Venice-themed resort hotel and casino, and the 1.2-million-square foot Sands Convention Center. In doing so, he dramatically changed the Las Vegas business model by taking emphasis off gambling, and attracting conventioneers to Las Vegas midweek. The Sands Expo and Convention Center remains the only privately owned and operated convention center in the United States.
In May 2004, Adelson opened the million-square-foot Sands Macau emerged as the first Las Vegas-style casino in People's Republic of China. So successful was the venture that in just one year Adelson had recouped his entire $265 million dollar investment.
In December 2004, Mr. Adelson vastly increased his net worth upon the initial public offering of Las Vegas Sands (NYSE: LVS) by selling just 10% of the shares. Since then, the stock price has climbed up 135%, and Adelson, with his family, owns 244 million shares worth approximately $17 billion.
On May 26, 2006, Adelson's Las Vegas Sands won a heavily contested license to build a casino resort in Singapore's Marina Bay. The new casino is set to open in 2009 at a projected cost of $3.16 billion.
On August 28, 2007, Adelson opened the $2.4 billion Venetian Macao Resort Hotel on Cotai, and announced a project to imitate a massive, tightly contained resort area he has dubbed the Cotai Strip, in a nod to its Las Vegas counterpart. The overall plan is for Las Vegas Sands, which runs the Sands Macao on the Macau peninsula, to invest $12 billion and build 20,000 hotel rooms on the Cotai Strip by 2010.
Presently, Mr. Adelman is Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of the Las Vegas Sands Corp., the parent company of Venetian Macao Limited, which operates the Venetian Casino Resort and the Sands Expo and Convention Center.
Mr. Adelson is also presently building the $1.8 billion Palazzo resort adjacent to Wynn Las Vegas.
In May 2007, he won coveted Singapore gaming license. Plans to build $3.5 billion Marina Bay Sands on 51-acre site with a view of the Singapore skyline. It was Adelson’s experience and successful track record in the convention business that propelled him ahead of rivals MGM Mirage and Harrah's Entertainment despite the fact that those companies had teamed up with Singaporean companies.