Sheldon Adelson

Sheldon Adelson in 2010

Sheldon Gary Adelson (August 4, 1933 – January 11, 2021) was an American business magnate, investor, philanthropist, and political donor. He was the founder, chairman and chief executive officer of Las Vegas Sands Corporation, which owns the Marina Bay Sands in Singapore, and is the parent company of Venetian Macao Limited, which operates The Venetian Resort Hotel Casino and the Sands Expo and Convention Center.

Quotes

• What I would say is, "Listen. You see that desert out there, I want to show you something." ... You pick up your cellphone and you call somewhere in Nebraska and you say, "OK let it go." And so there's an atomic weapon, goes over ballistic missiles, the middle of the desert, that doesn't hurt a soul. Maybe a couple of rattlesnakes, and scorpions, or whatever. And then you say, "See? The next one is in the middle of Tehran." So, we mean business.
• [to the Iranians] You want to be wiped out? [...] Go ahead and take a tough position and continue with your nuclear development. You want to be peaceful? Just reverse it all, and we will guarantee you that you can have a nuclear power plant for electricity purposes, energy purposes.
  • Comments at forum "Iran, Assimilation and the Threat to Israel and Jewish Survival" at New York's Yeshiva University, as cited in "Sheldon Adelson calls on US to nuke Iranian desert", The Times of Israel (24 October 2013)

• In this country [Israel] the one thing the Jews have been searching for for 3,000 years is acceptance and assimilation. And now that we've achieved acceptance and assimilation, it's turning out to be our undoing. Without Birthright, there are statistics that have been proven at least twice that there's only 42% of Jewish kids between the ages of 18 and 26 that say they marry within their religion or bring up their children Jewish. 42% is less than half the remaining. In another two or three generations there won't be any secular Jews left. So this the most important program of my lifetime. All the kids that go to Birthright – the number jumps from 42% to 76%.
  • 1 October 2016 IAC National Conference, Washington DC.

Quotes about Sheldon Adelson

• We should also implement a 10 percent surtax on the value of estates above $1 billion to break up the extreme wealth of the 540 billionaires in the United States-the wealthiest 0.0002 percent of America-and end tax breaks for dynasty trusts. This includes eliminating the so-called "grantor retained annuity trust," and the "generation-skipping tax," whose loopholes have allowed billionaires like Sheldon Adelson and the Walton family, the owners of Wal-Mart, to legally manipulate the rules for trusts passed on from one generation to the next without paying estate or gift taxes, resulting in savings of $100 billion in taxes since 2000.
  • Bernie Sanders Our Revolution (2016)

• Watching Sheldon Adelson pour millions of dollars into the campaign of the hero of American Nazism.
  • Eli Valley referencing donations to Donald Trump, from an interview (2018)