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If it's this bad, why, then, does every Vegasite I meet still talk as if he or she is about to go on a winning streak? The people in Vegas aren't nearly as depressed as those in far less devastated cities. "This is a town built on hopes and dreams, and people don't give up hopes and dreams when there's a recession," says Neal Smatresk, executive vice president and provost at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas. Anyone who has ever stood at a craps table knows that losers always believe they're one roll of the dice from starting a winning streak.
That is true even of Sheldon Adelson, who has lost more during this recession than anyone else on the planet. The 76-year-old chairman of the Las Vegas Sands Corp., which owns the Venetian hotel, the Sands Expo and Convention Center and the Venetian Macao, was in 2007 and '08 the third richest person in the world, with--by his estimate--a net worth of $40 billion. By February of this year, he said he had lost $36.5 billion--more than the GDP of half of the countries in the world. In the years before that slide, banks were begging him to take their money, given his massive success in building the first Vegas-style hotel and casino in Macao, China, in 2004. Adelson didn't hesitate, taking all he could get and building an entire mini-Vegas in Macao called the Cotai Strip, along with huge casinos in Singapore; he also doubled his Vegas space by adding the Palazzo to his Venetian hotel. In a short time, he has accumulated a debt-to-earnings ratio of 6.8 to 1 in the U.S. Then the loans stopped coming, and his stock price sank from $144 to $1.42 in March. (It now hovers at about $12.) That's his crane parked between the Venetian and the Palazzo resort, atop the St. Regis condominium, on which work has been halted for the foreseeable future.
Adelson is a self-made, risk-loving, Boston-born entrepreneur who, after creating the hugely successful COMDEX computer convention in 1979, helped turn Vegas into the top convention destination. He's a feisty ultraconservative who has managed, seemingly on purpose, to make enemies of all the other casino owners, a pretty friendly group. When his nemesis Wynn invited him to dinner recently to bury the hatchet, Wynn says Adelson refused, recalling that Wynn had once referred to him as Mr. Magoo. Sitting for an interview at a giant conference table, Adelson stops the conversation every time his videographer--who is either documenting Adelson's entire life or preparing a libel case against me--needs to change tapes and once when he feels the angle is wrong.
But other than making sure his good side faces the camera, Adelson doesn't seem worried about much besides his exercise-and-diet plan to reduce the gut he's added since he began to need a walker to get around. "If you believe what you read in the newspaper about us, we have one foot in the pail of bankruptcy and the other foot on a banana peel, and there's a high wind. It's all wrong," he says. Adelson, always a self-believer, has reinvested more than $1 billion in his company. But he has also fired his longtime right-hand man, been sued by shareholders and shed more than 700 Las Vegas employees since November.