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Sheldon Adelson

1933–2021 · 88 years Tier III

The taxi driver's son who lost two fortunes before keeping one

Portrait of Sheldon Adelson — User:Bectrigger — 2010 — CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons

Sheldon Adelson grew up in Dorchester, the son of a Boston taxi driver and a woman who ran a knitting shop, and started working before he was a teenager. At ten he borrowed two hundred dollars from an uncle for a license to sell newspapers. At fifteen he borrowed ten thousand more from the same uncle to start a candy vending-machine business. College didn't take, City College of New York, no degree, and neither did a stint at trade school training to be a court reporter. He served in the Army, then came home and tried toiletry kits, a windshield de-icing spray, and a charter tour company. By his thirties he had built and lost an entire fortune twice.

In the late 1970s Adelson and his partners built COMDEX into the world's largest computer trade show, and sold it to Japan's SoftBank in 1995 for more than five hundred million dollars, his share of the deal. He put that money into casinos: the Sands in 1988 for a hundred ten million dollars, then the Venetian in Las Vegas in 1999 for one and a half billion. Macau followed in 2004 and Singapore's Marina Bay Sands in 2010, a resort so costly to build it was briefly the most expensive building on Earth. The wealth moved as fast as it arrived, twenty-six and a half billion dollars in 2007, a ninety-three percent collapse to two billion by 2009 in the financial crisis, and a recovery past thirty-seven billion within four years.

The empire came with a legal shadow the size of a country. Federal investigators spent years on allegations that Las Vegas Sands paid a Macau lawyer to smooth its way into the territory, and in 2015 the company settled with the SEC for nine million dollars without admitting wrongdoing. A Hong Kong businessman named Richard Suen separately sued over a broken promise on Macau profits and won a jury verdict that, with interest, reached more than a hundred million dollars. Adelson fought organized labor at his Las Vegas properties for decades while building his fortune on a workforce he refused to let unionize. By 2001 he had been diagnosed with peripheral neuropathy, a nerve disease that increasingly confined him to a wheelchair even as he kept running the company from it.

Adelson died at his home in Malibu on January 11, 2021, at eighty-seven, after a long fight with lymphoma. His body was flown to Israel, where Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu met it on the tarmac at Ben Gurion Airport before the burial on the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem. The political operation outlived him mostly intact: he had put roughly half a billion dollars into Republican campaigns over the previous decade, was Donald Trump's largest single donor in both 2016 and 2020, and had bankrolled everything from the inauguration to the legal fund that defended Trump during the Mueller investigation. The casino magnate from Dorchester ended up better known, by the time he died, as the party's biggest check.

Lifespan

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Sheldon Adelson's life against the full span of the corpus.

Notable works

COMDEX company
Computer trade show grown into the industry's largest, sold to SoftBank in 1995 1979
The Venetian Las Vegas building
$1.5 billion resort that redefined the Las Vegas Strip as a convention destination 1999
Venetian Macao building
Recovered its $265 million investment within a year of opening 2007
Marina Bay Sands building
Singapore resort briefly the most expensive building ever constructed 2010
Israel Hayom company
Free daily newspaper that became Israel's most-read 2007