In 2007, three years after winning a stake in Macau with a $ 265 million casino, Mr. Adelson opened his next big thing: the Venetian Macao, a $ 2.4 billion 39-story hotel and casino – the seventh largest building in the world, with a paradise game almost as big as 10 football fields. Fanatical gamblers from Asia have arrived, and 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 obtain Spanish concessions. But he planned casinos in Japan, an untapped gambling mega-market, and, with billions at stake, he strongly lobbied against online gambling.
His company faced lawsuits, investigations and charges of bribing Chinese and American officials and tolerating prostitutes and the mafia. Mr. Adelson denied the allegations and was not personally involved. 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 issued an “honest” apology after implying that he profited from prostitution.
Sheldon Gary Adelson was born in Boston on August 4, 1933, one of the four children of Arthur and Sarah (Tonkin) Adelson. His father was a descendant of Ukrainian and Lithuanian Jewish ancestors; his mother had immigrated from England and one of the boy’s ancestors had been a Welsh coal miner. In the family’s two-room apartment in Boston’s Dorchester area, parents slept on a mattress and their children on the floor. Sheldon, an entrepreneur, sold newspapers and at 16 had candy vending machines in factories and gas stations.
He fought anti-Semitism and bullies on the streets and at Roxbury Memorial High School. “We had to go to school with at least four children,” he told Forbes in 2012. “Irish children came out of the bushes and tenements with rubber hoses, chains and an English punch.”
Mr. Adelson attended City College in New York in the 1950s, but dropped out after less than two years and joined the Army. He later sold personal care products, magazine ads and windshield defrosters; brokered mortgages, developed condominiums and booked chartered tours. After his success at trade shows, he bought the Sands Hotel and Casino for $ 128 million.