After the handover to China, the Macao SAR government ended the gambling monopoly of Stanley Ho and invited foreign companies to bid for a licence. The big Las Vegas casino owners were not so interested – Macao was small and remote.
In July 2001, Sheldon Adelson, owner of Las Vegas Sands (LVS), met Chinese Vice Premier Qian Qichen in the Purple Light Pavilion in Zhongnanhai in Beijing. Qian asked him how many hotel rooms he could build in Macao. “How many people do you want?” Qian said. Adelson saw a golden opportunity, with Beijing allowing its people to go to Macao to gamble.
January 13, 2021
published at 12:41 AMReuters
Las Vegas Sands Corp Chairman and Chief Executive Sheldon Adelson attends a news conference on the opening of Parisian Macao in Macau, China, Sept 13, 2016.
Reuters
Combative self-made billionaire Sheldon Adelson, who assembled the world’s largest casino empire and used his fortune to nurture conservative politicians and policies in the United States and Israel, has died at age 87.
The American casino mogul, raised in a poor Jewish immigrant family in Boston as the son of a cab driver, established lavish hotels and casinos in Las Vegas, Macau and Singapore, and headed the world’s largest casino company, Las Vegas Sands Corp.
Jacob Magid is The Times of Israel s US correspondent based in New York
US President Donald Trump alongside Las Vegas Sands Corporation Chief Executive and Republican mega donor Sheldon Adelson before speaking at the Israeli American Council National Summit in Hollywood, Florida, December 7, 2019. (AP Photo/Patrick Semansky)
NEW YORK As the US presidential campaign began to heat up in late mid-2016, New York investor Michael Steinhardt got a call from his longtime friend Sheldon Adelson, who was interested in meeting the Republican frontrunner, Donald Trump.
Steinhardt didn’t know the president-to-be, but he had met Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner in a previous business venture.
Sheldon Adelson, casino magnate who influenced policy from D.C. to Jerusalem, dies at 87 Donald Frazier Sheldon G. Adelson, a billionaire casino tycoon and free-spending political donor who helped bankroll conservative candidates in the United States and Israel, and who pushed the governments of both countries to reject the establishment of a Palestinian state alongside Israel, died Jan. 11 in Malibu, Calif. He was 87. The cause was complications related to treatment for non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, according to a company statement. Mr. Adelson (pronounced ADD-ul-son), who fought his way up from an arduous childhood in Boston, was a vivid and polarizing character, a serial entrepreneur who transformed gambling in Las Vegas and Macao and brought the same bare-knuckled approach to the exercise of political influence.