http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheldon_AdelsonEarly life and career
Adelson was born in to a Jewish family in the Dorchester neighborhood of Boston. His family emigrated to the United States from the Russian empire (mother's family from Ukraine, father from Lithuania).<3>. He worked at a young age selling newspapers on local street corners and owned his first business by the time he was twelve. In the years that followed, he worked as a mortgage broker, investment adviser and financial consultant. To this point in his career, Adelson has created and developed to maturity more than 50 different companies, including COMDEX, a tradeshow he developed with his partners for the computer industry and with the goal to get more visitors to his hotels.
In 1988, Adelson and his partners purchased the Sands Hotel & Casino in Las Vegas, Nevada. the former hangout of Frank Sinatra and the Rat Pack, in order to bring Las Vegas to a new phase of business centricity through the exhibition industry. The following year, Mr Adelson and his partners constructed the Sands Expo and Convention Center, the only privately owned and operated convention center in the United States.
In 1995, Adelson and his partners sold the Interface Group Show Division, including the COMDEX shows, to Softbank Corporation of Japan for a cash price in excess of $860 million. In 1991, while honeymooning in Venice with his wife Miriam (a physician), Adelson gained the inspiration for a mega-resort hotel, and he proceeded with the implosion of the venerable Sands and the construction of the $1.5-billion The Venetian, a Venice-themed resort hotel and casino. The luxurious, all-suite Venetian revolutionized the Las Vegas hotel industry, and has been honored with architectural and other awards naming it as one the finest hotels in the world. In 2003, The Venetian added the 1,013-suite Venezia tower - giving The Venetian 4,049 suites, 18 leading-chef restaurants, a shopping mall with canals, gondolas and singing gondoliers.
Adelson spearheaded a major project to bring the Sands name to the Macao SAR, China, the Chinese gambling city that had been a Portuguese colony until December 20, 1999. The one million-square-foot Sands Macau became the People's Republic of China's first Las Vegas-style casino when it opened in May 2004.
In addition, on May 26, 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 is expected to open in 2009 at a rumored cost of $3.16 billion.
On August 28, 2007, Adelson opened the $2.4 billion Venetian Macao Resort Hotel on Cotai and announced a vision to launch a massive, concentrated resort area he calls the Cotai Strip, after its Las Vegas counterpart. Adelson formally stated his plans to open more hotels under brands such as Four Seasons, Sheraton and St. Regis. Ergo, his Las Vegas Sands (which rand the Sands Macao on the Macau peninsula), plans to invest $12 billion and build 20,000 hotel rooms on the Cotai Strip by 2010.<4>
In 2007, Adelson made an unsuccessful bid to buy controlling interest in the Israeli newspaper Maariv. When this failed, he proceded with parallel plans to publish a free daily newspaper to compete with Israeli, a newspaper he had co-founded in 2006 but had left. <5> The first edition of the new newspaper, Israel HaYom, was published on July 30, 2007.
Since 1991, Adelson is married to Miriam Ochshorn, a physician.