In the late nineteen-eighties, one of his closest friends from childhood, Alan Rice, was the show director for a Las Vegas festival, Cinetex, that was organized by Interface in collaboration with the American Film Institute. Rice taped Adelson at one meeting when he was issuing orders. “About a month later, Sheldon came back and said, ‘You guys have done this all wrong, you didn’t follow my directions!’ ” Chudnofsky recalled. “Alan Rice said, ‘Stop for a second, Shel—I’m going to play a tape of the meeting for you.’ And Sheldon said the following: ‘What are you guys, crazy? Who are you gonna believe, me or the tape?’ ” (Rice declined to comment on the incident.)

During this period, Adelson remarked to Kaminer that he had finally realized what he was: an entrepreneur. “He said that before he heard the word he’d always thought he was a floater with a short attention span,” Kaminer recalled. Adelson spotted a new opportunity: Las Vegas. The city had focussed on high rollers and entertainment, but, Adelson thought, why not lure more business travellers with conventions and corporate meetings, and fill the hotels on weekdays? In 1989, Adelson bought the old Sands Hotel from Kerkorian for a hundred and twenty-eight million dollars, and established a new company, Las Vegas Sands. He built the country’s largest exhibition center next to the hotel. The local establishment mocked him, but as conventions flocked to Las Vegas he was proved right.

Adelson, who separated from Sandra in 1988, met Miriam Ochshorn on a blind date the following year. Miriam, an Israeli internist, was at Rockefeller University as a guest investigator on an exchange program, and was living with her two young daughters in a New York apartment. Miriam’s specialty was the treatment of drug addiction. Sandra Adelson had three children, whom Sheldon had adopted when they were young. Their two sons, Mitchell and Gary, both had substance-abuse problems, and during the eighties Adelson had helped to establish drug-treatment centers. Adelson was still living in Boston, but he and Miriam began spending a great deal of time in Las Vegas.

In mid-November, 1993, during the annual Las Vegas Comdex show, Adelson met with Masayoshi Son, a software distributor from Japan who had made his first million while still an undergraduate student, at the University of California at Berkeley, and had started a company, SoftBank, in 1981, when he was twenty-four. (Today, Son is the fifth-richest man in Japan, according to Forbes.) Son told Adelson that he was interested in acquiring Comdex but did not have the money; Adelson told him to come back when he did. The following year, the two met again; Adelson later said that he thought they were meeting to continue a discussion Son had had with one of Adelson’s partners about Interface’s interest in another deal—but, to his surprise, Son told him he wanted to discuss the possibility of buying Comdex, and he would name a price after reviewing the company’s financials.

At the time, Adelson had three partners in Interface, and they were eager to sell, having entertained offers for several years. One of the partners, Irwin Chafetz, had a mantra: “Nothing is forever.” Now, as an incentive to persuade Adelson to sell, they agreed to relinquish their interests in Las Vegas Sands. At a meeting in mid-January, 1995, Son made an offer, and the next month Comdex was sold to SoftBank for more than eight hundred million dollars. Adelson, with a controlling stake in the company, reportedly earned five hundred and ten million dollars from the sale.

Shortly before the eventful meeting between Son and Adelson in November, 1994, Adelson had made a proposal to his three adult children. In 1989, he had arranged for each of them—Mitchell, Gary, and his daughter, Shelley—to receive 2,941.24 shares of stock in Interface, in trusts; now he broached the possibility of buying the shares back. In a discussion with Mitchell on October 20, 1994, Adelson alluded to the risks of stockownership; he also said that he had long been trying to sell Interface but had not received any appropriate offers, and he did not foresee selling the company in the near future. Adelson believed that his sons could not support themselves or their families (he had been supporting them, either directly or by furnishing assets that provided their support), and that the transaction would assure them a steady stream of income and a later lump sum. Adelson asked Mitchell to convey the proposal to Gary and Shelley. On November 10th—days before the meeting in which Son told Adelson that he wanted to buy Comdex—the three children signed documents agreeing to sell their shares to their father, at a price based in part on a valuation of the entire company of four hundred and thirty million dollars, half of what it sold for several months later. The children received just under $5.3 million for their shares from Adelson.

In September, 1997, Adelson’s sons sued their father, alleging that he had defrauded them by not divulging material information, in order to induce them to sell their stock for less than its fair value. (Adelson’s daughter, who was married to a company executive, did not join the suit.) In April, 2001, the sons lost in a trial in Massachusetts Superior Court. In the Findings of Fact, Associate Justice Hiller B. Zobel wrote, “The evidence during the 14-day trial depicted, like something from the playwright Arthur Miller, a harsh, demanding, unfeeling, successful businessman frustrated in his inability to actuate his self-indulgent, substance-abusing, over-pampered, and (as he believes) ungrateful sons.” In the Conclusions of Law, the judge wrote, “Defendant Adelson, although perhaps lacking paternal kindliness and, indeed, cordiality generally, did not mislead, cheat, or defraud Plaintiffs.” In a separate memorandum, Justice Zobel denied a motion that Adelson had made to tax his sons with deposition costs. Mitchell, who pursued the case in appellate court, lost there, too, in 2004. (In September, 2005, Mitchell, who was married and had three sons, died unexpectedly at the age of forty-eight. Miriam Adelson recently told the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz that he died of a drug overdose.)

In 1996, Adelson demolished the old Sands hotel and began building the Venetian. Instead of small rooms with no amenities and all-you-can-eat buffets, it would have four thousand rooms, of seven hundred square feet each, with minibars, fax machines, and telephones equipped for conference calls. It would offer world-class restaurants, a shopping mall with luxury boutiques, and the world’s largest casino. Since Adelson was building this mega-resort at a time when Las Vegas was suffering from a glut of rooms and many operators were cutting prices, his competitors felt threatened.

Adelson, typically, was consumed with things large and small: the precise replication of the Campanile di San Marco and the Bridge of Sighs, the tassels on the curtains, the question of whether it was cheaper to rent or buy cranes (he bought), the color of the canals (he ordered them drained and their surface repainted, for a more perfect blue). “He would reëngineer everything every day,” Ken Moelis, an investment banker who has known Adelson since the eighties, said. Moelis added that this approach reflected Adelson’s attitude toward most things in business and in life. “It’s taking nothing for granted. ‘Just because it’s been done this way, so what?’ He’s just a grinder on everything. He chops up problems and goes back to square one. If you say, ‘Let’s start by saying there are fifty people out there,’ he says, ‘Why? Why do you say fifty?’ ” After a pause, Moelis added, “But I have to say—he’s a great entrepreneur.” In May, 1999, when the Las Vegas Venetian opened, Adelson’s rivals enjoyed the spectacle. Many shops and restaurant spaces were still under construction, and building inspectors hadn’t approved all of the hotel rooms. Adelson and his contractors were in court, there were hundreds of millions of dollars of liens on the hotel, and picketers were demonstrating on the Las Vegas Strip.

Like all major Las Vegas hotel casinos, the Sands was a union hotel when Adelson bought it, but the Venetian was non-union. This sparked a singularly bitter war with the Culinary Union, which had for many years maintained good relations with most hotels on the Strip. (Adelson has said that the benefits he gives his employees are superior to union benefits.) After a rally in which a thousand union supporters picketed in front of the Venetian, Adelson tried to have them removed by the police, and when that failed he went to court, arguing that the sidewalks outside the Venetian were private property, and not subject to the First Amendment. The Venetian lost in the district court and the appellate court, and in 2002 the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear the case.

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When Adelson learned that the Denver-based National Jewish Medical and Research Center was planning to host an event in Las Vegas in March, 1998, to honor John Wilhelm, the head of the Culinary Union at the time, he called the president of the hospital to protest. The event went on as planned, and, according to the Las Vegas Review-Journal, one participant, the Nevada senator Richard Bryan, referred to the man “who is dining alone tonight.” In 1999, Las Vegas’s Temple Beth Sholom was holding a dinner to fête the new mayor of Las Vegas, Oscar Goodman. Adelson, a member of Beth Sholom, had recently pledged two hundred and fifty thousand dollars to the temple’s new-building fund. The dinner was to be held at the Venetian, but Mayor Goodman said that he would not cross the picket line, and synagogue officials decided to go elsewhere. Adelson excoriated Beth Sholom’s rabbi, Felipe Goodman. Rabbi Goodman told the Review-Journal that Adelson had been “so verbally abusive. I was very upset because no one had ever talked to me like he talked to me.” After the dinner took place at the Four Seasons, Adelson withdrew his pledge to Beth Sholom. He gave large sums to the local Chabad, a branch of the Hasidic Chabad-Lubavitchers, for the construction of a new center.