Kenneth Moelis is an investment banker who’s been involved in a few good-sized Las Vegas deals over the course of his career, but unless we’ve missed a big chunk of local history, we consider it a bit of a stretch to say he helped build Las Vegas.
Moelis, 52, grew up in New Rochelle, New York, son of the owner of an equipment-leasing company. At six he was shining shoes and as a teenager, he worked in the collections department of his dad’s company.
He earned an MBA from the Wharton School at University of Pennsylvania and took a job at Drexel Burnham Lambert, well-known as the investment bank where Michael Milken pioneered the junk bond. At Drexel, Moelis reportedly "collaborated" with Milken, which probably means that Moelis hung onto Milken’s rocket ship for dear life, though before Drexel crashed and burned, Moelis did become a managing director of Milken’s bond operation in Los Angeles. (The Milken story is much more interesting, to us, than the Moelis story, at least as it relates to building Las Vegas, but that’s a question for another day.)
We couldn’t find any direct evidence of it, but it’s possible that Moelis assisted Milken in raising the capital to finance the $650 million Mirage in the late ’80s. That would explain Moelis’s involvement in further Wynn investment deals, such as the March 2009 public offering of $180 million (earning $1.6 million in the deal).
After leaving Drexel, Ken Moelis worked for Donaldson Lufkin & Jenrette as the head of its investment-banking corporate-finance division. From there, he became the president of UBS Investment Bank before founding his own investment bank, Moelis & Company.
while at Drexel, however, Moelis also advised Carl Icahn in his bid to restructure the bankrupt TransWorld Airlines. He also helped Stephen Bollenbach, at the time CFO of Holiday Hotel Corporation, in rebuking a takeover by by Donald Trump. Moelis spearheaded Bollenbach when, in 1997, he attempted a $13 billion hostile takeover of ITT Corporation, which owned Caesars World at the time. (The attempt failed; Starwood Lodging paid $14.6 billion for Caesars and a couple years later, sold the Desert Inn to Steve Wynn.)
But Moelis and Bollenbach weren’t through with their deals. In 2007, Moelis helped sell Hilton for $26.2 billion to Blackstone Group, the most expensive acquisition of a hotel company in history.
In another super-tanker-sized Las Vegas-related deal (and this might be where the claim of Moelis as a "builder" of Las Vegas comes in), he got involved when the deal between MGM Mirage and Dubai World that financed CityCenter imploded. CityCenter's lenders started withholding funds after MGM auditors raised the specter of the company going under.
Moelis, reportedly, worked day and night for eight weeks to "convince the lenders that they would be better off finishing what they had started."
Moelis described the deal as a "complex transaction in a difficult environment that needed creative solutions," with "too many disparate views and too many hard feelings." But the situation was resolved, the auditors' outlook on MGM improved, and CityCenter was completed.
Moelis & Co. subsequently advised Dubai World on restructuring its $26 billion in debt.
Perhaps the most colorful bit of Ken Moelis’s history has to do with Ozzie Osbourne, whose family lived next door to the Moelis’ 15,000-square-foot Beverly Hills mansion when they were starring in the "The Osbournes" on MTV. An entire episode of "The Osbournes" was devoted to flaming the Moelises (who weren’t identified) due to the "incessant sound of bouncing balls from the banker’s tennis court."
The Osbournes moved away after the show ended, and Ken Moelis commented on the feud: "You don’t want to fight with a guy who has a live movie camera."
