Question of the Day - 23 December 2022

There was only one way to answer this question and while we had our doubts, we still gave it a shot. We called Treasure Island and asked to be connected with Mr. Ruffin. 

Although he's a billionaire, 87 years old, owns a slew of businesses, and has two young children (12 and 9) with 41-year-old Miss Ukraine 2004 Oleksandra Nikolayenko, Ruffin has a reputation as a hard-working hands-on no-nonsense kind of executive, who gets to his office at TI at 5 a.m.; he is, after all, the son of a grocer. So we weren't especially surprised, though we were quite gratified, that he was apparently sitting at his desk when our call was patched through and he picked up. 

So we got to ask him your questions.

“I don’t think [the guitar hotel] will have any kind of impact on us,” Mr. Ruffin told us. “It’s not a very high building and we’re well-known and have very big signs. That’s not going to be a problem for us.

“The reason we didn’t bid on the Mirage,” he continued, “is that you don’t get the ground and the building. All you get is the operational side. When we buy something, we want the ground and building and that’s been sold to Vici [Properties]. What Hard Rock has is an operating agreement and we don’t like operating agreements. That’s why we didn’t bid. The [Seminoles] have a lot of money. They make a lot of money out of Florida, so they can afford to do whatever the hell they want to do. They’ll be a good neighbor for us. It should be OK.”

We didn’t press Ruffin on why he didn’t buy The Mirage prior to the Vici purchase, but we suspect it has to do with the asking price. Although he picked up Treasure Island in 2009 for $775 million and Circus Circus/Slots A Fun in 2019 for $825 million, both from MGM Resorts, he never took the Mirage bait. Always value conscious, Ruffin acquired Treasure Island for a bargain seven times cash flow and Circus Circus for 10 times, but MGM wanted 14 times for The Mirage, pushing the asking price well past the billion-dollar mark. (Hard Rock paid $1.1 billion and, as Ruffin said, didn’t even obtain the real estate.)

Along with Circus Circus came a huge parcel of undeveloped land on the Strip, 102 acres to be exact, a serious coup. (Ruffin paid  $662.5 million in cash; the other $162.5 million was a note due 2024.) He's still biding his time in terms of developing the empty acreage (a baseball stadium is still possible) and we’re sure we won’t know anything more about it until he’s good and ready to spill the beans.