Business Blog: Hoover’s Business Insight Zone

Last week I mentioned Sheldon Adelson, head of Las Vegas Sands, in a post I made from the convention floor in Las Vegas. In fact, I slept that night in Adelson’s signature hotel, The Venetian. Now Gary Rivlin of the New York Times offers an insightful profile on Adelson, the ultra-rich, ultra-combative mogul behind the twin booms of Las Vegas and Macao.

When 3rd Place on the Rich List Just Isn’t Enough

Few Americans have made as much money in China as Mr. Adelson, and he is a major donor to the Republican Party. Yet Mr. Adelson may well be the richest American that most people have never heard of. . . .

Certainly people in Las Vegas know Mr. Adelson, a querulous figure who has existed in a near-constant state of embattlement since building the Venetian in the late 1990s. . . .

“Sheldon is a brilliant businessman, but he can be enormously difficult,” said Gary Loveman, chief executive of Harrah’s, the Las Vegas-based casino giant. “When he has a strong point of view, he pursues it very stridently.”

“He’s very tough,” Mr. Loveman added. “Some would say unreasonably tough.” . . .

Yet Mr. Adelson is hardly slowing down to enjoy other aspects of life. He is looking past Asia, already talking about replicating his Macao strategy and creating a mini-Las Vegas somewhere in Europe.

“I work for a guy who’s obsessed,” said Robert G. Goldstein, one of a troika of top executives who have been with Mr. Adelson since 1995. Every time the Sands reaches another milestone, Mr. Goldstein said, his boss establishes a new, harder-to-reach goal.

“He has more money than he can ever spend but he has to grow it bigger,” he said.

Read the story particularly for the scoop on Adelson’s hardscrabble youth; it’s amazing how early poverty drives some people to such intense and long-lasting ambition.

[Photo of The Venetian hotel via stock.xchng.]