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Sheldon Adelson Back Story Sheldon Gary Adelson (born August 4, 1933) is an American business magnate. He is the Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of the Las Vegas Sands Corporation, the parent company of Venetian Macao Limited which operates The Venetian Resort Hotel Casino and the Sands Expo and Convention Center. Adelson vastly increased his net worth upon the initial public offering of Las Vegas Sands in December 2004. He is listed in the Forbes 400 as the eighth wealthiest American. His personal wealth is estimated to be $24.9 billion as of March 2012. Early life Adelson was born and grew up in the Dorchester neighborhood of Boston, Massachusetts, the son of Ukrainian Jewish immigrants. He worked as a mortgage broker, investment adviser and financial consultant. He started a business selling toiletry kits, and in the 1960s he started a charter tours business. Adelson went to college at the City College of New York, but dropped out. Originally a Democrat, Adelson became a Republican as his wealth increased. "Why is it fair that I should be paying a higher percentage of taxes than anyone else?" he once asked. He began making major contributions to the Republican National Committee following clashes with labor unions at his Las Vegas properties. COMDEX and casinos The original source of Adelson's wealth and current investments was the computer trade show COMDEX, which he and his partners developed for the computer industry; the first show was in 1979. It was the premier computer trade show through much of the 1980s and 1990s. In 1988, Adelson and his partners purchased the Sands Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas, the former hangout of Frank Sinatra and the Rat Pack, in order to bring Las Vegas to a new source of business from the exhibition industry. The following year, Adelson and his partners constructed the Sands Expo and Convention Center, then the only privately owned and operated convention center in the United States. In 1991, while honeymooning in Venice with his second wife, Miriam, Adelson found the inspiration for a mega-resort hotel. He razed the Sands and spent $1.5 billion to construct The Venetian, a Venice-themed resort hotel and casino. In 2003, The Venetian added the 1,013-suite Venezia tower - giving the hotel 4,049 suites; 18 leading-chef restaurants; and a shopping mall with canals, gondolas and singing gondoliers. In 1995, Adelson and his partners sold the Interface Group Show Division, including the COMDEX shows, to SoftBank Corporation of Japan for $862 million; Adelson's share was over $500 million. Adelson spearheaded a major project to bring the Sands name to Macau, the Chinese gambling city that had been a Portuguese colony until December 1999. The one million- square-foot Sands Macao became the People's Republic of China's first Las Vegas- style casino when it opened in May 2004. Adelson made back his initial $265 million investment in one year and, because he owns 69% of the stock, he increased his

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wealth when he took the stock public in December 2004. Since the opening of the Sands Macao, Adelson's personal wealth has multiplied more than fourteen times. Adelson's company is reportedly under federal investigation over alleged bribery related to the project. In May 2006, Adelson's Las Vegas Sands was awarded a hotly contested license to construct a casino resort in Singapore's Marina Bay. The new casino, Marina Bay Sands, opened in 2010 at a rumored cost of $5.4 billion. In August 2007, Adelson opened the $2.4 billion Venetian Macao Resort Hotel on Cotai and announced that he planned to create a massive, concentrated resort area he called the Cotai Strip, after its Las Vegas counterpart. Adelson said that he planned to open more hotels under brands such as Four Seasons, Sheraton and St. Regis. His Las Vegas Sands planned to invest $12 billion and build 20,000 hotel rooms on the Cotai Strip by 2010. News media In 2007, Adelson made an unsuccessful bid to purchase the Israeli newspaper Maariv. When this failed, he proceeded with parallel plans to publish a free daily newspaper to compete with Israeli, a newspaper he had co-founded in 2006 but had left. The first edition of the new newspaper, Israel HaYom, was published on July 30, 2007. According to Target Group Index(TGI) survey published in July 2011, Israel HaYom, which unlike all other Israeli newspapers is distributed for free, became the number one daily newspaper (on weekdays) four years after its inception. This survey found that Israel HaYom has a 39.3% weekday readership exposure, Yedioth Ahronoth 37%, Maariv 12.1%, and Haaretz 5.8%. The Yedioth Ahronoth weekend edition is still leading with 44.3% readership exposure, compared to 31% for the Israel HaYom weekend edition, 14.9% for Maariv, and 6.8% for Haaretz. This trend was already observed by a TGI survey in July 2010. Philanthropy Adelson donated over $25 million to the The Adelson Educational Campus in Las Vegas to build a high school. In 2006 Adelson contributed $25 million to the Yad Vashem Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Authority. Since 2007, the Adelson Family Foundation has made contributions totalling $100 million to Birthright Israel, which finances Jewish youth trips to Israel. Adelson also has funded the Boston based Dr. Miriam and Sheldon G. Adelson Medical Research Foundation. AMRF is a private foundation. This foundation initiated the Adelson Program in Neural Repair and Rehabilitation (APNRR) with $7.5 million donated to collaborating researchers at 10 universities. Wealth At one point, Adelson's estimated wealth was $26.5 billion, making him the third richest person in the United States according to Forbes for both 2007 and 2008. In 2008, the share prices of the Las Vegas Sands Corp. plunged. And in November, 2008, Las Vegas Sands Corp. announced that it might default on bonds that it had outstanding, signaling the potential bankruptcy of the concern. Adelson lost $4 billion in 2008, more

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than any other American billionaire. In Forbes 2009 world billionaires list, his ranking dropped to #178 with a net worth of $3.4 billion, but in 2011 he was ranked as the world's 16th richest man with a net worth of $23.3 billion. Awards and honors Adelson and his wife, Miriam Adelson, were presented with the Woodrow Wilson Award for Corporate Citizenship by the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars of the Smithsonian Institution on March 25, 2008. Adelson received the Chairman's Award from the Nevada Policy Research Institute, a think tank in Las Vegas, for his efforts to advance free market principles in Nevada. Additionally, President George W. Bush appointed the Adelsons to serve on the Honorary Delegation to accompany him to Jerusalem for the celebration of the 60th anniversary of the State of Israel in May 2008. Personal life Sheldon Adelson was born in Boston to a poor Jewish family. His Lithuanian-born father was a taxi driver and an ad salesman. From the 1970s Adelson lived in Massachusetts with his wife, Sandra, and their three adopted children, Mitchell, Gary and Shelley. They divorced in 1988. Mitchell died of a drug overdose in 2005. Sheldon met his current wife Miriam Ochsorn on a blind date the following year and married in 1991. Miriam is an Israeli physician specializing in drug abuse.