Sheldon Adelson Wiki – Sheldon Adelson Biography
Sheldon Adelson, the chairman and CEO of Las Vegas Sands and a major donor to Republican politicians, has died.
He was an American businessman investor, oligarch, and political donor, who was the main financial backer of Donald Trump throughout his presidency.
He was the founder, chairman and chief executive officer of Las Vegas Sands Corporation, which owns the Marina Bay Sands in Singapore, and the parent company of Venetian Macao Limited, which operates The Venetian Resort Hotel Casino and the Sands Expo and Convention Center. He owned the Israeli daily newspaper Israel Hayom, the Israeli weekly newspaper Makor Rishon, and the American daily newspaper the Las Vegas Review-Journal. Haaretz wrote that Adelson had “hijacked” the Israeli-American Council to turn it into a pressure group for his “hard-right agenda.
Adelson created the Adelson Foundation in 2007. He and his wife Miriam Adelson were Trump’s largest donors; they provided the largest donation to Trump’s 2016 campaign, his presidential inauguration, his defense fund against the Mueller investigation into Russian interference, and the 2020 campaign. Adelson was also a major backer of Benjamin Netanyahu.
As of September 2020, Adelson was listed by Forbes as having a fortune of US$33.5 billion, making him the 28th-richest person in the world and 17th in Forbes 400. He was a major contributor to Republican Party candidates.
Sheldon Adelson Age
Sheldon Adelson has died at the age of 87 years old.
Early Life
Sheldon Gary Adelson was born in 1933 and grew up in the Dorchester neighborhood of Boston, the son of Sarah and Arthur Adelson. His father’s family was of Ukrainian Jewish and Lithuanian Jewish ancestry. His mother immigrated from England, and Adelson claimed that his grandfather was a Welsh coal miner. 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 begn his business career at the age of 12, when he borrowed $200 from his uncle (or $2,740 in 2017 dollars) and purchased a license to sell newspapers in Boston. Aged 16 in 1948, he then borrowed $10,000 (or $102,349 in 2017 dollars) from his uncle to start a candy-vending-machine business. He attended the City College of New York, but did not graduate, and attended trade school in a failed attempt to become a court reporter, then subsequently joined the army.
After being discharged from the army, he established a business selling toiletry kits, 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 tour business. He soon became a millionaire, although by his thirties he had built and lost his fortune twice. Over the course of his business career, Adelson created almost fifty of his own businesses, making him a serial entrepreneur.
Wife & Children
In the 1970s, Sheldon Adelson lived in Massachusetts with his wife, Sandra, and her three children, Mitchell, Gary and Shelley, whom Sheldon adopted when they were young. The couple divorced in 1988.
Adelson met Miriam Farbstein Ochshorn, a medical doctor, on a blind date the following year; they married in 1991. She was previously married to a Tel Aviv physician, Dr. Ariel Ochshorn, with whom she had two daughters. Miriam “Miri” Farbstein was born in Mandatory Palestine in 1946, to parents that fled Poland before the Holocaust and settled in the city of Haifa. After earning a Bachelor of Science in Microbiology and Genetics from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and a medical degree from Tel Aviv University’s Sackler Medical School, she went on to become the chief internist in an emergency room at Tel Aviv’s Rokach (Hadassah) Hospital. In 1993, she founded a substance abuse center and research clinic there, and in 2000, the couple opened the Dr. Miriam and Sheldon G. Adelson Research Clinic in Las Vegas.
GOP Donor
Adelson spent his fortune — pegged at $35 billion by Forbes — to become an influential behind-the-scenes-player in Washington, working to shape US policy toward Israel, help guide Republican Party strategy and lobby against threats posed to his business interests.
He donated hundreds of millions of dollars to medical research and Jewish causes. He owned Israel’s largest daily newspaper by circulation; donated to Yad Vashem, the Holocaust remembrance center in Jerusalem; and helped underwrite Birthright Israel, which pays for educational trips to Israel for young Jewish adults.
But he was perhaps best known in the United States as a Republican mega-donor whose millions helped shape the course of presidential and congressional elections in the post-Citizens United era.
Adelson and his wife, Miriam, donated hundreds of millions of dollars to Republican-aligned super PACs. They plowed more than $215 million into federal super PACs in the last two years, making them largest publicly disclosed donors of the 2020 elections, according to a tally by the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics.
Adelson did not always support the front-runner in GOP intraparty fights.
In the 2012 Republican presidential primary, for instance, Adelson invested heavily in a super PAC that helped extend former House Speaker Newt Gingrich’s presidential run.
Gingrich eventually lost the nomination to Mitt Romney, but Adelson’s spending underscored his loyalty to Gingrich, with whom he shared a hawkish stance on Israel.
Rags To Riches
Adelson was born August 4, 1933, in Boston. His father, an immigrant from Lithuania, drove a cab, and his mother, whose family came from Wales, ran a small knitting service. He and his siblings slept on the floor of the family’s tenement apartment.
Adelson often touted his rags-to-riches story and his determination to claw his way out of poverty.
At age 12, he was selling newspapers on street corners in Boston. By 16, he had invested in candy machines. After a stint in the Army, he continued to run businesses, selling condominiums, working as a mortgage broker, taking a turn as a venture capitalist.
“Despite being the grandson of a Welsh coal miner and the son of a Boston cab driver, I’ve had the remarkable experience of being part of almost 50 different businesses in my more than 70-year business career,” he wrote in the Washington Post piece touting Trump.
His big break came in the late 1970s, when he launched a computer trade show known as Comdex. He sold it in 1995 for nearly $900 million, parlaying that convention business into a casino empire that comprises the properties in Asia, and the upscale Venetian and Palazzo resorts in Las Vegas. His venture became the world’s largest casino company.
His properties ranged from the opulent Venetian casino resort in Las Vegas, where visitors can ride in gondolas, to a string of lucrative casinos in the Chinese gambling enclave of Macao.
In October 2020, the company told multiple outlets that it was in “very early discussions” about a possible sale of its Las Vegas properties. He sold Sands Bethlehem in Pennsylvania in 2019.
In person, Adelson was instantly recognizable for his thinning patch of bright red hair and the electric scooter he rode everywhere. He suffered from peripheral neuropathy, a condition that made walking difficult.
He generally shied away from media interviews.
His family’s 2015 purchase of one of his hometown newspapers, the Las Vegas Review-Journal, was cloaked in secrecy, forcing journalists at the paper to do their own digging to determine the identity of their new bosses.
During his cancer battle, Adelson had curtailed his office hours at the company he founded, although the company said in a statement that Adelson continued to perform his duties as its chairman and CEO.
Calling his achievements in the hospitality industry “well-documented,” the company said that Adelson’s vision “transformed the industry, changed the trajectory of the company he founded, and reimagined tourism” in Las Vegas, Macao and Singapore.
Cause of Death
Sheldon Adelson, the chairman and CEO of Las Vegas Sands and a major donor to Republican politicians, died late Monday following complications related to his cancer treatment, his company said. He was 87.
