Back in March, when his company, Las Vegas Sands, was trading at over $80 a share, I reckoned that Sheldon Adelson’s bubble was ripe for bursting. Today, it’s bumping along at about $11. Is Adelson still the richest Jew in the world? According to Forbes, he’s not even the richest Jew in America: that would be Mike Bloomberg, with a net worth of $20 billion.
Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin are worth more than Adelson, too. Adelson was worth just $11 billion on October 1, and that was with LVS trading at almost three times its present level; he’s down in single digits at this point. I hope he’s diversified: Las Vegas Sands has almost $11 billion in debt and less than $1 billion in cash; a large chunk of its assets are unbuilt casinos in Macau. If Adelson can’t refinance when he needs to, LVS could go to zero.