Sheldon Adelson

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Sheldon Adelson at the Venetian Macao resort hotel, Macau, 2007.

© Paul Hilton—EPA/REX/Shutterstock.com

Sheldon Adelsonwas an American hotel-casino owner, newspaper publisher, and political contributor who earned an immense fortune from casinos in Las Vegas and Macau, enabling him to support conservative political causes on a large scale in the United States and Israel.

Adelson was born into modest circumstances in Dorchester, a neighbourhood of Boston. His father was a Lithuanian immigrant who drove a taxicab. The younger Adelson started out in business at age 12, selling newspapers. According to some accounts, he attended City College of New York (now a unit of the City University of New York) but did not graduate. After serving in the United States Army, Adelson started businesses in such varied fields as mortgage banking, charter tour operation, and hotel toiletries. He was said to have made and lost large sums several times.

In the 1970s Adelson and several partners in Massachusetts formed the entity that became known as the Interface Group. In 1979 Interface launched COMDEX (Computer Dealers Exposition), a computer industry trade show, even though Adelson himself claimed no expertise in computers. COMDEX convened annually in Las Vegas and soon became one of the world’s largest trade shows in its field and the first building block of the Adelson fortune. He purchased the Sands hotel and casino in Las Vegas from Kirk Kerkorian in 1989 and set up the Las Vegas Sands Inc. (LVS; from 2004 Las Vegas Sands Corp.) to run it. In 1990 he opened the Sands Expo and Convention Center, one of the largest privately owned convention centres in the United States, at a location near the hotel. Adelson sold COMDEX to Son Masayoshi’s Softbank Corporation in 1995. The Interface Group continued in existence as a holding company for some Adelson interests.

Adelson demolished the Sands in 1996 and built in its place the towering Venetian Resort Hotel Casino (later called the Las Vegas Venetian), which opened in 1999. A themed hotel-casino like many others in the city, the Venetian came complete with its own Grand Canal and gondoliers. With subsequent additions, it became one of world’s largest hotel complexes. Even though the original Sands hotel was no more, Adelson’s casino company retained the Las Vegas Sands name. Adelson gained even greater prominence in the Las Vegas community by purchasing the city’s largest daily newspaper, the Las Vegas Review-Journal, in 2015.

Adelson saw an opportunity for expansion in Macau, a tiny (11.7 square mile [30.4 square km]) gambling destination on the southern coast of China. LVS obtained one of the first new gaming licenses to be issued after Macau passed from Portuguese to Chinese jurisdiction in 1999. The Sands Macao opened in May 2004 and was an immediate success, earning back its investment in less than a year. The Venetian Macao, modeled on the Venetian Las Vegas, opened in 2007, and several other casinos in the Macau region followed. Macau soon surpassed Las Vegas as the world’s highest-grossing gambling centre. In 2010 LVS opened the Marina Bay Sands, a large casino and hotel in Singapore. The Asian casinos and the LVS company’s initial public offering of shares in December 2004 propelled Adelson—at a fairly advanced age—into the ranks of the world’s wealthiest people.

In the early 1990s Adelson began to cultivate strong political views, and in subsequent years he became known as a “mega-donor” to the Republican Party. Taking full advantage of Supreme Court decisions that effectively removed limits on political contributions, he reportedly gave nearly $100 million in traceable donations during the 2012 elections. His contributions in 2016 were reportedly more than $50 million. The election that year saw Republican Donald Trump win the U.S. presidency, and Adelson remained a major backer, though Trump lost his bid for a second term in 2020. Apart from strictly partisan politics, Adelson also spent heavily in support of the War on Drugs and in opposition to the legalization of online gambling. His donation to conservative causes in 2020 was estimated at $430 million.

A strong supporter of Israel, Adelson began to involve himself in that country’s internal politics after his marriage to an Israeli woman, Miriam Ochshorn, in 1991. The main beneficiary of his largesse was the two-time prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu. At great expense, Adelson founded a free newspaper, Israel Hayom (“Israel Today”), in 2007. Offering consistent support for Netanyahu and his conservative policies, Israel Hayom became the most widely circulated paper in the country.

In 2019 Adelson revealed that he had been diagnosed with non-Hodgkin lymphoma. He died from complications of the disease nearly two years later.