In 2007, three years after getting a scene in Macau with a $ 265 million casino, Adelson opened his next big thing: the Venetian Macao, a $ 2.4 billion hotel and casino with 39 floors – the world’s seventh largest building with a game paradise almost as big as ten football fields. Asian fanatical gamblers flooded in, and Mr. Adelson has multiplied his wealth many times.
He built other casino hotels in Macau, Singapore and Pennsylvania and added the Las Vegas Palazzo. In 2013, he abandoned plans for a $ 30 billion resort near Madrid after failing to win Spanish concessions. However, he plans casinos in Japan, an untapped mega-market for gambling, and with billions at stake, they have worked hard against online gambling.
His company is facing lawsuits, investigations and accusations that they are bribing Chinese and American officials and that they are tolerating prostitutes and the Mafia. Mr. Adelson denied the allegations and did not personally imply. His company was also not convicted of serious offenses, although he paid a $ 47 million fine in 2013 to avoid criminal charges in a money laundering investigation.
The Democratic congressional campaign committee once apologized “sincerely” after insinuating that he had taken advantage of prostitution.
Sheldon Gary Adelson was born on August 4, 1933 in Boston, one of four children of Arthur and Sarah (Tonkin) Adelson. His father was descended from Jewish Ukrainian and Lithuanian ancestors; his mother immigrated from England, and one of the boy’s ancestors was a Welsh coal miner. In the family’s two-room apartment in the Dorchester area of Boston, the parents slept on a mattress and the children on the floor. Sheldon, a go-getter, sold newspapers and at 16 it was candy vending machines in factories and filling stations.
He fought anti-Semitism and toughness in the streets and at Roxbury Memorial High School. “We had to go to school with at least four children,” he told Forbes in 2012. “The Irish children came from the woods and houses with rubber pipes and chains and copper knuckles.”
Mr. Adelson attended New York City College in the 1950s, but retired after less than two years and joined the Army. He later sold toiletries, magazine ads and windshield washer detergents; market mortgages, develop apartments and book rental tours. After his successes on the stock exchange, he bought the Sands Hotel and Casino for $ 128 million.