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He doesn't seem too crushed by his losses. "A billion dollars doesn't buy what it used to. So it's not as tragic as one would assume," he says. "I say to my wife that the worst tragedy I could have in business deserves a two-hour cry, and I scale down from there. I didn't cry one moment." When his wife asked him to cut back on expenses, he dismissed the suggestion, telling her he still had more money than they could ever spend. Eventually he capitulated: whenever possible, he uses his small private jet instead of his big one.
Adelson may have changed planes, but he's not changing his strategy of using high-end dining, giant suites and plush convention spaces to attract customers. He does not believe that America is going to fundamentally change its values from extravagance to thrift. "There's no way this world will change. There's no way people are going to stop doing things they want to do ... People aren't going to say, 'I'm going to see Old Faithful or the redwoods instead of taking a trip to Vegas. Or I'll go to Cape Cod with a book.' I don't think they're going to do that. I used to fish. I don't want to go back," he says. "That's the nature of people. It's like the old song, How you going to keep them down on the farm once they've been to gay Paris?" The last part, Adelson, whose bank account has been pretty much wiped out by the recession, sings. And rather well.
But behind all that confidence, I figure, must be some hard lessons learned. This is the man who has been taught the main moral of this recession better than anyone else: you can't borrow more than you can afford to repay. His debt is going to be hard to dig out of even if things get better soon. So when I ask how long it will be before he'd even consider getting a loan for more expansion, I expect him to apologize for his recklessness and pledge to become a saver. Instead, he sits up, widens his eyes and smiles. "As soon as someone wants to lend it," he says. "I'll be first in line."
So Vegas has made its bet. This recession, it clearly believes, is just another business cycle. It will end, sooner rather than later, and the world will go right back to gambling on slot machines and real estate and tasting menus and double-digit corporate earnings. In fact, Wynn bet me $100, an amount I had to spend several minutes explaining to him, that the U.S.'s GDP growth will be positive by April 2011. In the meantime, he and the other people who run Vegas believe the deck will get reshuffled and new players will sit down at the table as casino owners, but the game itself won't change. Americans, they think, will continue to get economically better off. It sounds a little hollow, especially looking at this city in the desert that creates nothing, the world's greatest ghost town in waiting. But a lot of people have gone broke betting against the people who run Las Vegas. Besides, the Las Vegas people have no choice but to bet things will go back. They're all in.
Breaking and Entering To watch Joel Stein wander in a foreclosed Las Vegas house, go to time.com/vegasrecession