The richest man in Vegas has declared war on internet gamblers
Eighty-year-old billionaire casino owner Sheldon Adelson hates email, doesn't text, and wants to stop you from betting online
theverge.com
In February, an attack ad titled "Don’t Let the Games Begin" started popping up in online gambling forums.
The ad opens on two shadows shaking hands in a dark city alley. We see a distraught mother at her laptop, a young child at a computer in a dim bedroom, police cars with sirens. A narrator with a scaly voice comes on. "An established al-Qaeda poker network could extract enough untraceable money from the United States in just a few days to fund several 9/11-sized attacks," he says. "Say no to internet gambling."
The message is clear: internet gambling will fund terrorism and destroy your family.
Players reacted strongly, calling it "ridiculous hysterics" and "distortion at its best." "Get a life, Sheldon!" one commenter wrote.
Sheldon is of course Sheldon Adelson, the 80-year-old billionaire casino owner who has declared war on internet gambling, breaking with the rest of the industry. He’s now pledged to spend " whatever it takes" to fight the spread of online casinos, and no one knows why.
ALL INAdelson grew up the son of poor Jewish immigrants in Dorchester, Massachusetts, where he bought the rights to sell newspapers on a popular corner at age 12. He co-founded the influential trade show Comdex — despite having little personal interest in computers — then sold it for more than $860 million in 1995 and got into the casino business. He’s now the 9th-richest person in the world, according to Forbes, with a fortune of around $36 billion.
Adelson has been the biggest single donor to many organizations, including the Israeli Holocaust museum Yad Vashem and the failed presidential campaigns of Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney. He is passionate and outspoken about politics, but only very specific causes. He once told The Wall Street Journal that a pro-union measure was " one of the two fundamental threats to society." The other was radical Islam.
The billionaire’s denunciation of online gambling is relatively recent. In 2001, Adelson told The Washington Post he thought it was a promising opportunity. In 2003, his company, Las Vegas Sands Corporation, spent $1.3 million exploring the possibility of running an offshore online gambling center in the UK. In August of 2011, it was reported that Adelson was "neutral" on the subject but expected to support a bill legalizing online poker. But when a Justice Department ruling effectively legalized online gambling just four months later, Adelson was fiercely opposed. "It’s a threat to our society," he wrote in an editorial, "a toxin which all good people ought to resist."
Adelson has given several reasons for what Politico called his " internet jihad." At first, he said the technology doesn’t exist to stop kids from playing. Since then, he’s cited the danger of addiction, the possibility of money laundering, the threat to land-based casinos, and the fear that Facebook will come in and "squash" his business.
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