Sheldon Gary Adelson (pronounced /ˈædəlsən/; born August 4, 1933) is an American business magnate, investor, and philanthropist. He is the founder, chairman and chief executive officer of Las Vegas Sands Corporation, which owns the Marina Bay Sands in Singapore, and is the parent company of Venetian Macao Limited, which operates The Venetian Resort Hotel Casino and the Sands Expo and Convention Center. He also owns the Israeli daily newspaper Israel Hayom, and the Las Vegas Review-Journal. Adelson, a lifelong donor and philanthropist to a variety of causes, founded with his wife’s initiative the Adelson Foundation.
As of August 2016, Adelson was listed by Forbes as having a fortune of US$32.2 billion. He is a major contributor to Republican Party candidates. He has been one of the largest donors, of any party, in both the 2012 and 2016 presidential campaigns. He was the largest donor to Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign with a total of $125 million.
Early life and education
Sheldon Gary Adelson was born into a low-income family and grew up in the Dorchester neighborhood of Boston, Massachusetts, the son of Sarah (née Tonkin) and Arthur Adelson. His family was of Ukrainian and Lithuanian Jewish ancestry. His mother immigrated from England, and one of his grandfathers was a Welsh coalminer. His father drove a taxi, and his mother ran a knitting shop.
“An entrepreneur is born with the mentality to take risks, though there are several important characteristics: courage, faith in yourself, and above all, even when you fail, to learn from failure and get up and try again.”
-Sheldon Adelson, 2013
He started his business career at the age of 12, when he borrowed $200 from his uncle (or $2,640 in 2015 dollars) and purchased a license to sell newspapers in Boston. At age 16 in 1948, he then borrowed $10,000 (or $98,500 in 2015 dollars) from his uncle to start a candy-vending-machine business. He attended trade school to become a court reporter and subsequently joined the army. Adelson attended City College of New York, but decided to drop out to dedicate his full time to entrepreneurship.
He established a business selling toiletry kits after being discharged from the army then started another business named De-Ice-It, which sold a chemical spray to help clear frozen windshields. In the 1960s, he started a charter tours business. He had soon become a millionaire, although by his 30s he had built and lost a fortune twice. Over the course of his business career, Adelson has created almost 50 of his own businesses.
Adelson is chairman and majority shareholder of Las Vegas Sands, the world’s largest casino operator. The Las Vegas-based business controls casino resorts and convention centers in the U.S. and Asia. He owns more than half of the publicly traded company, which had about 50,000 employees and revenue of $12.9 billion in 2017.
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