“They always derided, they always demonized our convention strategy,” he said, according to a 2008 New Yorker profile. “And look who is laughing last.” Entering Macau was Adelson’s most successful wager. Following the 1999 handover of the former colony to China, Adelson won the rights to build the Sands Macao, the city’s first Las Vegas-style casino. After the 2004 opening, he recouped his construction cost in a matter of months. He wound up with five casinos there.
When the Trump administration announced that it supported relocating the US embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, a proposal vehemently opposed by Palestinians, Adelson offered to personally underwrite the cost of the move. Once a Democrat, Adelson became a Republican even though he claimed he was liberal on some social issues. In 2012, he wrote a Wall Street Journal opinion piece titled “I Didn’t Leave the Democrats. They Left Me.” His split came from disagreements over foreign policy such as the level of US support for Israel, the cost of government welfare programs and corporate tax policies. An opponent of an independent Palestine, he helped finance Israeli and Jewish causes. Adelson started Israel HaYom, a Hebrew language conservative daily that became the country’s largest newspaper by circulation. He later bought two other newspapers. He also campaigned heavily against online betting, on moral grounds. Sheldon Gary Adelson was born on Aug 4, 1933, in the Dorchester neighborhood of Boston, where he started life in a one-room tenement. His Lithuanian-born father drove a cab, and his mother, who came from Ukraine, managed a knitting shop. Poor Start
“This could be a rags-to-riches story, but my family was too poor to own rags,” he said in a 2000 interview with Businessweek magazine.