Inside Asian Gaming

December 2013 | INSIDE ASIAN GAMING 33 Gambling and the law Fortunately for the gaming industry, Mr Trump is so well known that most stories never mentioned his casinos. Not so with Sheldon Adelson. Mr Adelson bet very big on Mr Romney and other conservative Republicans in nine Senate races. Many stories noted that the money he contributed in 2012 made him the largest political donor in American history. And every news report included his ownership of casinos. All of his money was wasted, with the possible exception that the GOP kept the US Senate seat in Nevada. But it was more than thrown away: Mr Adelson actually campaigned against himself. The owner of Las Vegas Sands started the year as the biggest backer of Newt Gingrich. There is general agreement that without Mr Adelson’s millions, Mr Gingrich would have dropped out of the primaries after his early losses. Instead, Mr Gingrich had the cash to run attack ad after attack ad against Mr Romney, focusing on his“vulture capitalism” at Bain Capital. This reinforced the image of Mr Romney that the Obama campaign was pushing. And it extended the primary fights, forcing Mr Romney to take extreme right-wing positions that were caught on tape. Forbes lists Mr Adelson as the 11th richest American, and his political contributions show just how much money he has. Americans have trouble thinking about the difference between “million” and “billion.” I like the British terminology better, which calls the larger number“a thousand million.” Mr Adelson has somewhere around $25 thousand million, give or take a few thousand million. This means he has more money than was spent by Messrs Obama and Romney and the Democratic and Republican parties and all independent groups on the presidential election—four times as much. Ironically, he probably made more money during Mr Obama’s presidency than any other individual. His LVS stock was at $5 a share when Mr Obama took office; it is now above $76. Mr Adelson gave people like Mr Romney and Karl Rove about $53 million. This is an enormous amount, for an election. But not for Adelson. As a nice comparison, a couple of weeks after the election, Mr Adelson had LVS declare a special dividend, giving him about $1.2 billion. That’s $1,200 million; $53 million really is the size of a rounding error. It is about two-tenths of one percent of his assets. If you own a home that is above water and have some money in the bank, you might be worth about $100,000. Donating 0.2% would mean just writing a check for $200. The problem for the gaming industry is that it looks like it is filled with people with money to burn, and who have their own agendas at best, or who are divorced from reality at worst. Howard Stutz wrote an “Inside Gaming” column in the Las Vegas Review-Journal entitled “Piles of cash, torrents of tweets and lots of crazy.” In it, he discussed not only Messrs Trump and Adelson, but also Mr Wynn’s constant attacks on President Obama. Mr Wynn characterized Mr Obama as a The continuing Democratic majority in the US Senate means Nevada casinos keep one of the best friends they have ever had, Harry Reid (D.-NV), as majority leader.