In many successful companies and businesses, there is often just a single inspirational individual behind it all. This is especially true when it comes to the gambling industry.
Sheldon Adelson
When thinking of powerful gambling industry moguls, Sheldon Adelson is one of the most famous of all time. Though he recently passed away in January 2021, he still very much deserves inclusion and recognition as one of the largest, wealthiest, and most influential gambling operators in all of casino history.
Founder, Chairman, and Chief Executive of Las Vegas Sands Corporation, Adelson was still very much active in its management until about a year before his death at the age of 87.
Since the 80s, his influence and contribution to the gambling industry has been immense, and likewise, so was his fortune, owning one of the largest hotel and casino companies in the world. With properties in the US, Singapore, and Macau, Adelson was the first to coin the term “integrated resort”, referring to the now common combination of hotels and leisure facilities with casinos.
His passing coincides with an end to a great formative era in gambling, now swiftly moving into the digital age, and much is owed to this once incredible businessman.
Steve Wynn
Another historical casino giant, Steve Wynn has had many decades of success in the gambling industry and is well-known for creating some of the famous land-mark casinos around the world.
A native to Connecticut, USA, Wynn began his successful career in the industry in the 1970s when he acquired a controlling interest in the Gold Nugget casino in Las Vegas. After integrating and transforming the casino into a highly popular destination resort, so began the formation of his world-famous casino empire.
At the age of 79, Wynn owned and operated one of the largest and most successful casino resort companies in existence, Wynn Resorts Ltd, with several high-class casino resorts around Las Vegas and Macau. He built, and personally helped design, some of the most popular landmark casino destinations, for tourists and gamblers alike, around the world.
Stanley Ho & Son
Another giant of the industry that has passed away recently in 2020, at the ripe old age of 98. Dr. Stanley Ho Hung Sun has often been referred to as the “King of Gambling” and was a major contributor in transforming Macau into the gambling Mecca that it is today.
Fortunately, his son, and highly capable business partner, Lawrence Ho Yau Lung, has long taken up his father’s reins, becoming the CEO and chairman of Melco International in 2001.
In the 1960s, Stanley Ho was historically instrumental, along with his business partners, in winning a public tender from the Macau government granting monopoly for the provision of services within Macau’s borders. This prevented international casino companies from entering the country, a law which was only amended in 2002.
Since then, in the highly capable hands of Lawrence Ho, there have been a number of collaborations between his father’s company and other wealthy foreign companies such as Australia’s Crown Resorts, to create some of the largest and most popular land-mark casinos in the world.