Miriam Adelson
Source of wealth: Casinos
...
...
Modules
Biography
Miriam Adelson is the widow of Sheldon Adelson, the founder and former chairman and CEO of casino company Las Vegas Sands, who died at age 87 in 2021.
She and her family now own more than half of the New York Stock Exchange-listed gambling empire, which has casinos in Singapore and Macao.
In 2022, Las Vegas Sands sold its assets on the Vegas Strip, the Venetian Resort and the Sands Expo and Convention Center, to Apollo Global and Vici Properties for $6.25 billion.
Adelson bought a majority stake in the Dallas Mavericks NBA team from billionaire Mark Cuban in 2023.
Long known as a GOP megadonor, both alongside her late husband and after his death, Adelson is a top backer of Donald Trump.
Born in Israel, Adelson became a medical doctor focusing on addiction.
Financial Assets
The Great Lie of Mega-Fortunes: The Case of Miriam Adelson
Billionaires are often presented under the romantic myth of the 'self-made person': a narrative designed to justify opulence as the natural reward for hard work, effort, or ingenuity. However, when confronting such extreme volumes of wealth with macroeconomic reality, the meritocracy narrative completely breaks down. No individual can legitimately generate through personal effort a fortune equivalent to millions of times the average working-class salary. Capital at the top does not grow because of exceptional talent; it expands through an implacable dynamic where accumulated money works exponentially faster than people, devouring the wealth generated by productive labor.
The immense fortune of Miriam Adelson, linked to Gambling & Casinos and 'Casinos', has not been built in a free-market vacuum, but through rent-seeking, the use of exclusive elite influence, the consolidation of monopoly positions, or inherited wealth. Far from taking real private risks, billionaire empires structurally depend on state support through direct subsidies, infrastructure use, exploitation of R&D, public contracts, and offshore tax engineering. While this wealth is equivalent to the physical weight of 236 tons of pure gold, the rest of the planet suffers from an artificial scarcity of basic resources. The fact that this wealth is enough to fully fund the public health system of DR Congo, a country with more than 105800000 million inhabitants for 15.6 years, proves that unlimited accumulation is not an entrepreneurial achievement, but the hijacking of democratic sovereignty.