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Dealing Himself Out: 87-year-old Sheldon Adelson is stepping aside from Las Vegas Sands for now to … [+]
(Photo by Denise Truscello/Getty Images for Global Gaming Expo)
Sheldon Adelson, the founder, chairman and chief executive officer of casino empire Las Vegas Sands, is taking a medical leave of absence to resume cancer treatment.
The 87-year-old Adelson was first treated for non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma in March 2019 but recently undergone another round of treatment, Las Vegas Sands announced on Thursday. He will take a leave from his duties, but it’s unclear for how long.
Robert Goldstein, the president and chief operating office of Las Vegas Sands, is now acting chairman and CEO.
Adelson, who is the majority owner of Las Vegas Sands and worth $35.7 billion, has come a long way from sleeping on the floor of a Boston tenement. He started off selling newspapers but made his first fortune by building and selling the Comdex technology conference to Softbank for $862 million in 1995. Today, he is the 37th-richest person in the world.
The casino mogul is a well-known supporter of outgoing President Donald Trump and Republican mega-donor. Adelson and his wife Miriam have spent at least $180 million—a record-breaking sum—to back President Trump and the GOP ahead of this year’s election.
But Adelson’s support of Trump seems to have its limits. The Las Vegas Review, which Adelson owns, published an editorial in mid-November, about a week after Trump lost the presidential election, calling for Trump to stop delaying “the inevitable” and quit spreading false claims of a rigged election. The editorial put it bluntly: “ . . . Mr. Trump lost this election because he ultimately didn’t attract enough votes and failed to win a handful of swing states that broke his way in 2016.”
After pro-Trump supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol building on Wednesday in a failed attempted to stop the certification of President-elect Joe Biden’s victory, the Review-Journal’s words seem like a warning:
“But the president does a disservice to his more rabid supporters by insisting that he would have won the Nov. 3 election absent voter fraud. That’s simply false,” the editorial read. “There is no evidence, however, that fraud cost Mr. Trump the election, no matter how much the president tweets the opposite and his supporters wish it so.”
Las Vegas Sands stock is down 1.25% since Wednesday.