During the 1990s, Sheldon Adelson became one of the leading entrepreneurs in the gambling industry as the primary developer and owner of the Venetian Casino resort on the Las Vegas Strip.
Adelson was born in 1933 in Boston, the son of a cab driver. He worked hard and studied hard as a youth. He received a bachelor’s degree in real estate and corporate finance from the City University of New York. After a period of service in the United States Army, Adelson set upon a plan to make himself fabulously rich. He succeeded more than one time. As a venture capitalist in the 1960s, he acquired scores of companies, only to see his budding financial empire fall as the stock market took a plunge in 1969. He came back by developing a series of trade shows, the most important of which was COMDEX, the leading computer dealers’ exposition, and by the 1980s, the leading annual convention in Las Vegas each year. The success of the show led to other ventures such as developing airlines. That success also focused his attention upon Las Vegas. The convention was a gold mine for Adelson, but even Las Vegas did not have enough convention space. He privately built a facility next to the Las Vegas Convention Center and gave it to the county, realizing that his revenues from his big show would cover his capital costs in a few years. But he wanted more – his own convention center.
The Venetian Casino owned by Sheldon Adelson is the first two-billion-dollar casino property anywhere.
In the late 1980s, Sheldon Adelson was able to finance the purchase of the Sands Casino Hotel from its owner, Kirk Kerkorian. In 1989, it was licensed by the Nevada Gaming Commission, and Adelson became a casino magnate. Actually he was just holding on to the property waiting for something bigger. In 1993, he built the Sands Exposition Center, a one-million-square-foot convention facility on the Sands property. But he was still waiting for something bigger. His chance to “do something” with the Sands came in 1995 when he was able to sell the COMDEX show and sixteen other trade shows for $860 million. The next year he imploded (blew up) the Sands, and he devoted his new resources to the construction of the Venetian Hotel. The Venetian opened in April 1999 with a 113,000-square-foot casino, a shopping mall set alongside canals with gondolas, and 500,000 feet of new convention space. The hotel’s thirty-three-story tower and 3,000 rooms featured luxuries not found elsewhere. The basic room was over 700 square feet, making it the largest standard room for a hotel anywhere. The total square footage of the rooms actually exceeded that of the MGM Grand, with its 5,009 rooms. The facility had a first-phase price tag of $1.5 billion “plus.” The “plus” was the result of the fact that others paid the price. Adelson leased all the space for shops and restaurants, keeping only the casino, hotel, and meeting areas under his financial control. As the new century began, the revenues for the casino were meeting all expectations and then some, and Adelson was planning a phase-two construction of a museum and a new casino and hotel tower with 3,036 rooms adjacent to the Venetian.