Question of the Day - 15 September 2024

Few would call Steve Wynn and Sheldon Adelson friendly, given their intense business rivalry, with no more than a street’s width separating them in Las Vegas. 

Still, it was difficult to suppress a guffaw when the late Robin Leach claimed that a merger between Wynn’s Mirage Resorts and Adelson’s Las Vegas Sands was in offing. That notion was dead on arrival.

Perhaps Wynn and Adelson held some top-secret phone conferences. They shared an unbridled enthusiasm for Chinese Communist business methods (on which they publicly sang from the same hymnal) and Republican Party politics. However, most of their known communications were effected through the media.

A prime example of this was when Wynn publicly derided the first Western casino in Macau, Adelson’s Sands Macao, as “Sheldon’s box of baccarat.” The intention, presumably, was to unfavorably compare Sands’ quick-and-dirty Macanese foothold with Wynn’s custom-built Wynn Macau and its successors.

Adelson reciprocated by taking a poke at Wynn’s oft-lauded status as the Las Vegas Strip’s resident “visionary.” At a Global Gaming Expo event held at the Venetian, Adelson remarked that Wynn was no such thing and the real visionaries were Gary Loveman, at the time the CEO of Caesars Entertainment, and his managerial cohort. 

It’s quite odd that Adelson would embrace a gray button-down number-cruncher like Loveman, who was a professor for nearly at decade at Harvard Business School before going to work for Harrah's (later Caesars). Did Adelson unintentionally hex one of his favorites? Not long after, Loveman drove the Caesars bus front first into the bankruptcy ditch.

Dave Berns, a business reporter who covered the opening of the Venetian for the Las Vegas Review-Journal and later helmed the Las Vegas Business Press, has this take on the Adelson/Wynn dynamic. “It was complicated with many layers, two Jewish guys battling each other for the high-end gaming market along the Strip, then globally. Both were from back east. Both viewed themselves as kings. Both possessed huge egos and tempers. But damn, they could execute at the highest levels.”

No argument on that last point.

University of Nevada-Las Vegas history professor Michael Green picks up the narrative. “It appears that in the world in which Wynn and Adelson traveled, yesterday's enemy is today's ally. At one time, Wynn had great fun publicly humiliating Donald Trump. (He was on Don Imus' show and when Imus asked about their relationship, Wynn faked the sound of crying and said, 'I’ve tried so hard to make him like me.' Then he said Trump deserved credit, because it took a lot of ability to go bankrupt owning three casinos.) Now Wynn is one of his closest allies. 

“Adelson became one of Trump's closest allies. I think part of this may have grown from the enemy of their enemy being their friend, because both Wynn and Adelson had strong feelings about Barack Obama and politics generally."

He adds, “Occasionally, the rumor pops up that when Adelson opened the Palazzo in 2007, it was built in such a way that when the sun was right, it would cast a shadow over the Wynn, across the street to the north.”

That sounds like something Sheldon would do. He could be petty at times, magnanimous at others — as when he kept the entire Venetian/Palazzo workforce on salary during the COVID shutdown, including workers at the four-walled restaurants, when other casino magnates were slashing payroll left and right.

We give the final word to Nevada Independent and CDC Gaming Reports columnist and "Bard of the Boulevard” John L. Smith. He can boast that Wynn and Adelson were both avid readers of his columns … and both sued him (without success). “They never write, they never call,” he mock-laments.

"Adelson and Wynn were rivals who began as sniping competitors, even enemies. They were pretty entertaining, but of course couldn’t stand anyone laughing about them,” Smith writes.

"During the construction of the Venetian and Bellagio, they one-upped each other about their vision, their acumen, the quality of their carpet, and — Freudian alert! — the size of their rooms. Over the years, their politics grew more conservative, even reactionary, but they appeared to find an alliance after Wynn followed Adelson to Macau. Both were mega-supporters of Trump and Wynn still is.

“They both had something else in common, of course — their dislike of me. I called them out for things they wanted to be kept out of the newspaper. I spent years working to find out what was in their confidential Gaming Control files and paid a price for the effort. But I also found out what investigators focused on during their background checks.” Ever the diplomat, John L. leaves it at that.

So shall we say that Adelson and Wynn were "the best of frenemies." It was a distant relationship, perhaps, but one that had its uses.