Casino magnate, billionaire donor to GOP and Israel, dies
Sheldon Adelson, a cabdriver’s son who built the world’s largest empire of casinos and resort hotels in Las Vegas, Macao, Singapore and other gambling meccas and used his vast wealth to promote right-wing political agendas in America and Israel, died Monday night. He was 87.
The cause was complications of non-hodgkin lymphoma, a form of blood cancer, his company, the Las Vegas Sands, said Tuesday in a statement. It did not say where he died.
Adelson grew up tough, a Depression-era street urchin who hawked newspapers and fought roughnecks in Boston. Unfazed by risks, rivals or the law, he built a fortune estimated by Forbes in 2014 at $36.6 billion and by Bloomberg Billionaires Index at $40.8 billion, making him the world’s eighth- or ninth-wealthiest person.
By March 2016, Forbes said Adelson’s net worth had dropped to $25.2 billion, largely because of gaming revenue declines at his giant casino in Macao, on China’s south coast, where the swarms of junketing Chinese businessmen and Communist Party officials had all but dried up in a corruption crackdown by President Xi Jinping of China. But Adelson seemed to take the loss in stride, and it had no apparent effect on his political influence or his bottom line. In March 2019, Forbes put his net worth at $35.1 billion.
His ride to riches had been more roller coaster than escalator, anyway. After tak
ing the Sands public in 2004, his net worth grew for two years by $1 million an hour — weekends, holidays and nights included. In a few months in 2009, it fell from $30 billion to $2 billion. But by 2013, he had it all back, with billions to spare. Often the cash register rang up $2 million an hour.
Along the way, he drew countless gamblers and vacationers to his archipelago of fantasy resorts with Venetian-themed canals, motorized gondolas, singing gondoliers and replicas of St. Mark’s Campanile and the Rialto Bridge, all to support acres of slot machines and roulette wheels, lavish floor shows and the biggest, gaudiest hotels anywhere on the planet.
Adelson became one of America’s heavyweight political spenders — the largest single donor in the 2012 elections — following the Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling in 2010, which removed many limits on political contributions as unconstitutional infringements of free speech.
In May 2016, after Donald Trump became the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, Adelson told him in a private meeting in Manhattan that he was willing to contribute more to help elect him than he had given to any previous campaign, a sum that could exceed $100 million, according to two Republicans with direct knowledge of Adelson’s commitment. He eventually gave the Trump presidential campaign only $25 million but was still its largest donor.
After Trump’s election, Adelson gave $5 million to the committee organizing the inauguration festivities. It was the largest single contribution to any president’s inaugural event, and on the day of the swearing-in ceremony in January 2017, Adelson and his wife, Miriam, sat along the aisle a few rows back as Trump took the oath of office. Under the Trump administration, the Adelsons achieved at least one of their long-held goals: the relocation of the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, in 2018.
With cornucopias of cash, Adelson had for years showered king’s ransoms on Republican Party stalwarts. He was a major supporter of President George W. Bush in 2004, and gave $92.7 million to campaigns and super PACS supporting Newt Gingrich, Mitt Romney and others in 2012. He told Forbes he was willing to spend $100 million to defeat President Barack Obama.
Adelson’s influence was on display in March 2014, when four prospective presidential candidates — Govs. Chris Christie of New Jersey, Scott Walker of Wisconsin and John Kasich of Ohio, and former Gov. Jeb Bush of Florida — went to Las Vegas for what critics called an audition before the Republican Party’s most coveted and fearsome moneyman.
“The four Republican candidates prostrated themselves, seeking Adelson’s stamp of approval and cash,” Thomas B. Edsall wrote on the op-ed page of The New York Times.
Adelson set off another flap in December 2015 when he bought the Las Vegas Review-journal for $140 million, using a shell company to hide his involvement. When he was revealed as the buyer by his own newspaper, questions were raised about whether he would interfere with its journalistic independence. His family pledged that the paper would be “fair, unbiased and accurate,” but the editor and some staff members took a buyout and resigned. The Review-journal was reportedly the only major newspaper in the nation to endorse Trump for president.
In succeeding months, the new ownership brought financial muscle to the Review-journal, enabling it to hire personnel and upgrade equipment. But the newsroom was roiled by tensions between top editors on the one hand who saw it as part of their job to review coverage of Adelson and his family and business affairs, and, on the other, news staff members who chafed at what they regarded as inappropriate interference.
In Israel, where Adelson had a home and owned major conservative media outlets, he supported Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his Likud party. Adelsonopposed statehood for Palestinians, favored Israeli settlements in occupied territories and underwrote junkets to Israel by congressional Republicans.
He looked like a man spoiling for a fight: short, stout and pugnacious, with sparse reddish hair and a puffy pale face that reddened easily. Unions, reporters and associates he considered disloyal incurred his wrath. He kept bodyguards and lawyers close.
Adelson began his rise in 1979, when he and four partners started a Las Vegas computer trade show called Comdex. Years before computers proliferated in households, the show drew sellers and buyers to see the latest technology in a field that was growing exponentially. In the 1980s and ’90s, it was the nation’s top computer exhibition, and Adelson made $500 million from its sale.
In 1989, his partnership concluded the purchase of the Sands, the Frank Sinatra-rat Pack hangout in Las Vegas, and added a convention center. Honeymooning with his second wife in Venice, Italy, in 1991, he found the inspiration for his next move. He imploded the Sands in 1996 to make way for his $1.5 billion Venetian resort in 1999. By 2003, it had 8,000 suites and rooms and a casino the size of two football fields. He owned a majority interest in the corporation, and, taking it public, became a multibillionaire overnight.
Sheldon Gary Adelson was bor Aug. 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 had immigrated from England, and one of the boy’s forebears had been a Welsh coal miner. In the family’s tworoom flat in the Dorchester section of Boston, the parents slept on a mattress and the children on the floor. Sheldon, a go-getter, sold newspapers, and at 16 had candy-vending machines in factories and gas stations.
He fought anti-semitism and toughs in the streets and at Roxbury Memorial High School.
“We had to go to school with at least four kids,” he told Forbes in 2012. “The Irish kids came out of the bushes and tenements with rubber hoses and chains and brass knuckles.”
Adelson attended City College of New York in the 1950s but dropped out after less than two years and joined the Army. He later sold toiletries, magazine ads and windshield de-icers; brokered mortgages, developed condominiums and booked charter tours. After his trade show successes, he bought the Sands for $128 million.
Adelson had homes in Las Vegas; Malibu, Calif.; Boston and Tel Aviv, and flew to Israel six to eight times a year on his own jetliners. A staunch Zionist, he considered settling there.
“He fell in love with the country,” an associate told The Times.
Adelson’s first wife, Sandra, had three children, Mitchell, Gary and Shelley, all of whom he adopted. They divorced in 1988. In 1991, he married Miriam Farbstein Ochshorn, an Israeli physician, and had two sons, Adamand Matan. Complete information on his survivors was not immediately available.
Adelson and his wife contributed hundreds of millions to medical research, education and other philanthropies in America and Israel. They also gave $500,000 to Bush for his second inauguration in 2005, and in 2008 accompanied him to Jerusalem for the 60th anniversary of Israel’s founding.
Adelson had first visited Israel in 1988, wearing the shoes of his father, a Lithuanian-born Jew who had never made the trip.