Sheldon Adelson, the gambling magnate who wanted a Eurovegas in Madrid and a republican donor, dies

He American gaming mogul Sheldon Adelson has died of complications from his long illness, his wife reports. President and CEO of Las Vegas Sands and Sands China went on medical leave on January 7 after recently resuming cancer treatment. In March 2019, it became known that the businessman was being treated for non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. The boards of directors of the two companies appointed Robert G. Goldstein, current president and chief operating officer of Las Vegas Sands, as interim president and interim CEO of both companies while Adelson’s medical leave lasted.

Sheldon Adelson, 87, with an estimated net worth of $ 35.9 billion (29,298 million euros), appears in the 37th among the largest fortunes on the planet, according to ‘Forbes’. At the beginning of the last decade, the businessman tried to develop in Spain a large European complex of casinos and hotels, called Eurovegas, in Madrid or Barcelona, ​​although it finally ended up giving up on the project of the community chaired then by Esperanza Aguirre to bet on Asia.

When this son of a taxi driver arrived in Spain he was one of the Americans who had made the most money in the least time. Adelson is “a person with whom it is difficult to work and very bossy,” Bill Eadington, director of the Institute for the Study of the Gaming Sector, told EFE, who often dealt with former employees of the tycoon. Passionate about airplanes and owner of several private jets, he was also a extravagant man and acid humor: an investor asked him about the spanish project and he said that, from Spain, he loves food and tapas. His money has always flowed to the Republican Party every time an election came.

Son of Jewish emigrants from Eastern Europe, Adelson is considered a man self made and with business vision since childhood. He grew up in a house of just one room, dropped out of school, with 12 years he sold newspapers and at 16 he set up a business with jelly beans machines, according to ‘The Atlantic’ magazine. Over the years too sell toilet supplies for hotels with his brother and was in the mortgage business.

Despite not understanding computers, he and a couple of friends from his Boston neighborhood, who called themselves “the boys”, set up Comdex at the eighties, a computer fair that for a couple of decades was strong in Las Vegas, remembered ‘The New York Times’. In Las Vegas, the so-called “city of vice,” was where Adeldon starred in his true rise, which enriched him to compete with Bill Gates and Warren Buffett for being the richest man in the United States.

It is in this city when, On November 26, 1996, Adelson marks a before and after in his way of doing business, of conceiving casinos and even of being rich. They collect the Las Vegas guidebooks that made it big. With fireworks, the businessman ordered the demolition of the old Las Vegas Sands hotel, separated himself from his partners and, despite entering a retirement age, started a new project called Venetian.

That hotel, which opened in 1999, became the cornerstone of today’s Las Vegas Sands gaming empire. And even then in the American city neither the project nor its mentor went unnoticed. Adelson was noted because his pulse did not tremble to engage with suppliers, workers and especially with the unions, sometimes in court. Became the first complex in the area without union representatives among its workforce, say the US media. And the project did not go unnoticed, because it revolutionized the casino model: the objective was to attract businessmen.

The Venetian did away with the empty rooms that led down to the gaming tables, incorporating the minibar, the then prized fax machine, and whatever else was needed to improve the client’s stay and make it compatible with work. The casino empire has grown to nine current resorts in the United States, Macau and Singapore.

In the same way that at the beginning of the new century was the American who got rich faster, with the financial crisis of 2008 it was also one of the fastest losers, to the point that the company approached bankruptcy. Several open investigations into possible money laundering and alleged bribery in China have also clouded his business file. But having bet on Asia has been key for Adelson to once again be among the richest rich and for Las Vegas Sands to be considered the largest American gambling company.