Background and career
Sheldon Gary Adelson (August 4, 1933 – January 11, 2021) was an American businessman, investor, and political donor. He was the founder, chairman and chief executive officer of Las Vegas Sands Corporation, which founded the Marina Bay Sands luxury resort in Singapore, and the parent company of Venetian Macao Limited, which operated The Venetian Las Vegas and the Sands Expo and Convention Center. He owned the Israeli free daily newspaper Israel Hayom, the Israeli weekly newspaper Makor Rishon, and the American daily newspaper the Las Vegas Review-Journal. Adelson created the Adelson Foundation in 2007, a private charity focusing on healthcare and support of Israel and the Jewish people. He was a major contributor to Republican Party candidates and was often dubbed a "kingmaker" due to the size and frequency of his donations. He was Donald Trump's largest donor in 2016 and 2020, providing the largest donation to Trump's 2016 campaign, his presidential inauguration, his defense fund against the Mueller investigation into Russian interference, and his 2020 campaign. He was also a major backer of Israel's prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu. In 2020, Forbes listed his net worth as US$29.8 billion.
Adelson was born on August 4, 1933, and grew up in the Dorchester neighborhood of Boston, the son of Sarah (née Tonkin) and Arthur Adelson. He was Jewish. His father's family was of Ukrainian Jewish and Lithuanian Jewish ancestry. His mother emigrated from England, and Adelson said that his grandfather was a Welsh coal miner. His father was a taxi driver, and his mother ran a knitting shop. He began his business career at the age of 10 when he borrowed $200 from his uncle and purchased a license to sell newspapers in Boston. In 1948, at the age of 15, he borrowed $10,000 from his uncle to start a candy vending-machine business. He attended the City College of New York, but did not graduate. He attended trade school in a failed attempt to become a court reporter, then joined the United States Army. After being discharged from the army, he established a business selling toiletry kits, then started another business, De-Ice-It, which marketed a chemical spray that cleared ice from windshields. In the 1960s, he started a charter tour business. He soon became a millionaire, although by his thirties he had built and lost his fortune twice. Over his business career, Adelson created more than fifty companies.
In the late 1970s, Adelson and his partners developed the COMDEX trade shows for the computer industry, beginning in 1979. It was one of the largest computer trade shows in the world through much of the 1980s and 1990s. In 1995, Adelson and his partners sold the Interface Group Show Division, including the COMDEX shows, to SoftBank Group of Japan for $862 million; Adelson's share was over $500 million.
In 1988, Adelson and his partners purchased the Sands Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas for $110 million (approximately equivalent to $299,450,000 in 2025). The next year, he and his partners built the Sands Expo and Convention Center, then the only privately owned and operated convention center in the U.S. In 1991, while honeymooning in Venice with his second wife, Miriam, Adelson came up with the idea for a Venice-themed resort hotel and casino. He bought out his partners and then razed the Sands. He spent $1.5 billion to construct The Venetian, which opened on May 3, 1999.
In the late 2000s, Adelson and the company built a casino resort in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. It is one of five stand-alone casinos that were awarded a slots license by the Pennsylvania Gaming Control Board in 2006. The casino opened May 22, 2009. In 2010, during the Great Recession, Adelson told The Wall Street Journal "If it were today, we probably wouldn't have started it." In 2019, the Las Vegas Sands Corp. sold the Bethlehem casino for $1.3 billion to Alabama-based Wind Creek Hospitality. The new owner, Wind Creek Hospitality, is owned by the Poarch Band of Creek Indians. The casino's new name is the Wind Creek Bethlehem.
Adelson led a project to bring Las Vegas Sands casinos to Macau. The 1,000,000 square feet (93,000 m2) Sands Macao became China's first Las Vegas-style casino when it opened in May 2004. He recovered his initial $265-million investment in one year and, because he owned 69% of the stock, he increased his wealth when he took the stock public in December 2004. Following the opening of the Sands Macao, Adelson's personal wealth multiplied more than fourteen times. In August 2007, Adelson opened the $2.4 billion Venetian Macao Resort Hotel on Cotai and announced that he planned to create a massive, concentrated resort area he called the Cotai Strip, after its Las Vegas counterpart. Adelson said that he planned to open more hotels under brands such as Four Seasons, Sheraton, and St. Regis. His Las Vegas Sands planned to invest $12 billion and build 20,000 hotel rooms on the Cotai Strip by 2010. Adelson's company was reportedly under federal investigation over alleged violations of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act relating to payments made to a Macau lawyer. In 2015, Sands agreed to pay a $9 million settlement with the Securities and Exchange Commission, which included no admission of wrongdoing.
