Sheldon Adelson

• Born: August 4, 1933
• Birthplace: Dorchester, Massachusetts
• Died: January 11, 2021
• Place of death: Malibu, California

American investor, property developer, and hotel and casino owner

Adelson managed to accumulate one of the largest American fortunes of the early twenty-first century through shrewd investing and vision. He gave much of his wealth to further Jewish education in the Las Vegas area and to advance medical research. He also supported Republican political causes and worked to extend the influence of Israel in the United States and the Middle East.

Sources of wealth: Real estate; tourism; investments

Bequeathal of wealth: Educational institution; political organization

Early Life

Sheldon Gary Adelson (A-dehl-suhn) was the son of Jewish parents whose families came from Lithuania and the Ukraine. He was born in a lower-class area of Dorchester, a neighborhood in Boston, where his mother owned a knitting shop and his father drove a taxicab and sold advertisements. Adelson sold newspapers as a boy. He moved to New York in the early 1950’s to attend City College, where he majored in real estate and finance, but he left college without obtaining the required credits to graduate. He served a tour of duty in the army and then went to work as a stenographer on Wall Street. He became a millionaire by the early 1960’s by consulting with companies on how to sell their shares in the stock market. He thereafter returned to Boston and began speculating in businesses and increasing his wealth.

First Ventures

In Boston, Adelson began investing, eventually acquiring more than seventy different companies, the most profitable being a tour and travel business, American International Travel Service, which he bought with two friends in the 1960’s. The tour service subsequently generated millions of dollars. However, he lost his fortune when the stock market declined in the late 1960’s. He soon recouped his losses in the real estate brokerage business, but he lost another fortune when the condominium market crashed in the early 1970’s.

In 1971, he bought a majority share of a company that published computer magazines. He then began producing shows about computers, the first one held in Dallas, Texas, in 1973. By 1984, his Interface Group had produced more than forty shows, and his Computer Dealers Exposition (COMDEX) company, designed to bring computer manufacturers and retailers together, became the largest trade show in Las Vegas. By the 1980’s, Interface Company’s net income exceeded $250 million, and Adelson was producing trade shows in many cities in the United States, Europe, and Japan.

Mature Wealth

Looking for more opportunities, in 1988 Adelson and his partners from Interface bought the Sands Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas, which in the public mind was forever associated with Frank Sinatra and the Rat Pack. The new owners renovated the Sands, adding a $60 million convention center. Because of a declining economy, however, the convention center did not open until 1995. In that year, Adelson and his partners sold their interest in the trade show industry to Japanese investors for $862 million. Adelson’s profits in the transaction amounted to more than $500 million.

In 1996, Adelson razed the aging Sands in a nationally televised implosion to make way for his new project, a Venetian-themed hotel, for which he had gotten the idea while honeymooning with his second wife in Venice in 1991. The Venetian, a casino and hotel, in which all of the rooms were suites, opened in 1999. Constructed at a cost of $1.5 billion, the new hotel was a huge financial success. In 2003, Adelson added the Venezia Tower to the hotel, enlarging the facility to more than four thousand suites, eighteen first-class restaurants, and a shopping mall complete with canals, gondolas to transport the patrons, and singing gondoliers to pole them throughout the mall.

Adelson then turned his attention to the Far East, where he was among the first American investors to recognize a huge gambling and resort potential. He built the first Las Vegas-style casino in the People’s Republic of China, the Sands Macau, in a former Portuguese colony off the Chinese coast at a cost of $265 million. He planned to build seven more casinos in the same area, including the $2.4 billion Venetian Macau, which opened in August, 2007. Adelson also invested $12 billion to construct approximately twenty thousand hotel rooms in Macau’s Cotai Strip, with the intention of modeling this area after the Las Vegas Strip. He became the first American to acquire a casino license in Singapore, where he planned to build the $5.4 billion Marina Bay Sands resort.

To raise the capital for these ambitious enterprises, Adelson took his company, Las Vegas Sands Corporation, public in December, 2004. The success of the company’s initial stock offering resulted in Forbes magazine ranking Adelson as the world’s third-richest man, with a net worth of more than $20 billion. Because of the economic downturn, however, Adelson’s rank among the world’s richest declined to 178th by 2008.

Adelson has devoted a considerable portion of his wealth to Jewish philanthropic enterprises, such as the Birthright Israel organization. Birthright Israel provides financial assistance to enable young Jews between the ages of eighteen and twenty-six to travel to Israel. He contributed $25 million to the Yad Vashem Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Authority in Israel. He and his wife, Dr. Miriam Ochsorn Adelson, have donated more than $25 million to the Milton I. Schwartz Hebrew Academy in Las Vegas in order to build a high school.

The Adelsons have also given considerable financial support to medical research, founding the Dr. Miriam and Sheldon G. Adelson Medical Research Foundation in 2007. The foundation is especially concerned with neural repair and rehabilitation. Adelson has suffered with peripheral neuropathy and has walked with the aid of a cane since 2001. Miriam Adelson, a native of Israel, operates drug rehabilitation clinics in Las Vegas and Tel Aviv. Adelson’s adopted son Mitchell died of a drug overdose in 2005; his other adopted son, Gary, also suffers from drug dependency. The couple has plans to open more drug clinics in Israel and the United States. In early 2007, Adelson established the Adelson Family Charitable Foundation, which will eventually donate $200 million or more each year to Jewish and Israeli causes. The foundation’s first gift was a pledge of $25 million to Birthright Israel, which allowed the organization to double its capacity and bring twenty thousand participants to Israel during the summer of 2007.

Adelson has also been heavily involved in politics since accumulating his wealth. Although both he and his wife came from traditionally liberal families, he has contributed primarily to conservative political causes. In 2006, for example, he gave $1 million to former congressman Newt Gingrich’s conservative political organization, Solutions for Winning the Future. In 2007, Adelson founded Freedom’s Watch, a lobbying group that supports the involvement of the United States in Iraq, a militant stance toward Iran, and Republican candidates for Congress. Freedom’s Watch began an advertising campaign in 2007 urging members of Congress, whose support for the Iraq War was wavering, to continue to back the conflict. In 2007, Adelson also began publishing a newspaper, Israel HaYom (Israel today), which strongly opposes a two-state solution for the Israel-Palestine dispute and supports Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Since 2000, Adelson’s detractors have accused him of corrupt business practices and attempting to influence public policy by buying political influence, although Adelson has been acquitted of several infractions in lawsuits brought against him.

Adelson is a known Republican and has supported a number of Republican candidates. He was Donald Trump's largest donator during his 2016 and 2020 presidential campaigns, and also donated to his defense fund during the Mueller investigation. In 2020, Forbes listed him as the twenty-eighth richest person in the world with a fortune of $33.5 billion.

On January 11, 2021, Adelson died from complications of the blood cancer non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. He died in his home in Malibu, California, at the age of eighty-seven.

Legacy

Sheldon Adelson accumulated an enormous fortune because of his business acumen, his ruthlessness (some would say unscrupulousness), his vision, and his willingness to take chances. He realized the potential for trade shows on a massive scale and the advantages of Las Vegas as a venue for these shows. He recognized the future of the gaming industry was in the upscale, family-oriented luxury hotels, and he built one of the first and most profitable of these hotels in Las Vegas. He was among the first to see the potential of the Far Eastern gaming industry and invested heavily in that area of the world.

However, perhaps his most far-reaching legacy is his influence on American policy in the Middle East. His lobbying efforts on behalf of Israel and the policies of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will continue to affect the United States’ position in that volatile area of the world for generations to come. His generosity has also had a beneficial effect on Jewish education in the United States and on medical research and drug rehabilitation efforts in Israel and America.

Bibliography

Binkley, Christina. Winner Takes All: Steve Wynn, Kirk Kerkorian, Gary Loveman, and the Race to Own Las Vegas. New York: Hyperion, 2008. Focuses on the role of three entrepreneurs instrumental in the transformation of Las Vegas. Devotes relatively little space to Adelson, other than to denigrate his contributions to the building of the “new” Las Vegas.

Fallows, James. Postcards from Tomorrow Square: Reports from China. New York: Vintage, 2008. Thirteen articles, most reprinted from the Atlantic Monthly. One of the articles, “Macau’s Big Gamble,” deals with the gambling complex off China’s coast, with which Adelson is heavily involved

Gilder, George. The Israel Test. New York: Richard Vigilante Books, 2009. A strong endorsement of the beneficial role of the state of Israel in world society and of its prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. Expounds virtually the same interpretation of Israel’s influence on world history and Netanyahu’s policies as Adelson’s newspaper. Includes bibliography and endnotes.

McFadden, Robert D. "Sheldon Adelson, Billionaire Donor to G.O.P. and Israel, Is Dead at 87." The New York Times, 12 Jan. 2021, www.nytimes.com/2021/01/12/business/sheldon-adelson-dead.html. Accessed 30 Apr. 2021.

Mearsheimer, John J., and Stephen M. Walt. The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008. A well-documented denunciation of the malign influence of pro-Israel lobbying groups (including Adelson’s Freedom’s Watch) on American policy in the Middle East. Blames the “Israel lobby” for the Iraq War. Includes bibliographical references.

Smith, John L. Sharks in the Desert. New York: Barricade Books, 2005. A history of the Las Vegas casinos expressed through biographies of many of the men who built the gaming industry. Follows the story from the earliest mob-related casinos through the Howard Hughes era to the twenty-first century’s corporate giants, including Adelson.