How Miriam built the fortune
Adelson's wealth stems from Las Vegas Sands, the casino and resort company built by her husband, Sheldon Adelson, who died in January 2021. Most of his stake passed to her and to trusts for the family, which together own a majority of the listed company. As a result, her fortune moves mainly with the share price of Las Vegas Sands and with the dividends it pays.
Sheldon Adelson made his first large sums from COMDEX, a computer trade show he co-founded in 1979. He used the proceeds of its sale in the mid-1990s to build the Venetian resort on the Las Vegas Strip, which focused on conventions and business travelers as well as gamblers. The decisive move came in 2002, when Macau ended a long casino monopoly and Sands won a license. Its first Macau casino opened in 2004 and was followed by much larger resorts, while the company also won a license in Singapore, where Marina Bay Sands opened in 2010. Profits from Asia came to dominate the business.
In 2022 the company sold its Las Vegas properties and became a pure Asian operator. Miriam Adelson has since used part of her shareholding to diversify, most notably to buy into a professional basketball team. Las Vegas Sands has also looked for new markets in the United States, campaigning for casino legalization in Texas and pursuing a resort plan on Long Island in New York that it later dropped.
Companies and holdings
The family's main assets include:
- A majority stake, through Miriam Adelson and family trusts, in Las Vegas Sands, which owns the Venetian Macao, the Londoner Macao, the Parisian Macao and other resorts through its listed subsidiary Sands China, as well as Marina Bay Sands in Singapore
- A majority interest in the Dallas Mavericks of the National Basketball Association, bought in December 2023 together with her daughter's family, the Dumonts
- Israel Hayom, a free daily newspaper in Israel launched by Sheldon Adelson in 2007
To fund the Mavericks purchase, she sold a large block of Las Vegas Sands shares. Her son-in-law Patrick Dumont, president of Las Vegas Sands, became the governor of the team. The family also owns the Las Vegas Review-Journal, the largest newspaper in Nevada, which Sheldon Adelson bought in 2015.
Early life and career
Miriam Farbstein was born in October 1945 in Tel Aviv, in what was then British-ruled Palestine, and grew up in Haifa. Her parents had come from Poland before the Second World War. After serving in the Israel Defense Forces, she studied microbiology and genetics at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and then earned a medical degree from Tel Aviv University.
She became a physician specializing in addiction. She worked as an emergency doctor and later at Rockefeller University in New York, where she studied the treatment of chemical dependency. She met Sheldon Adelson in 1989, and they married in 1991. In 1993 she opened a drug abuse treatment and research clinic in Tel Aviv, followed by a second in Las Vegas in 2000, both focused on methadone-based therapy. She has continued to be involved in medical research while managing the family's holdings and political activities.
Philanthropy and public life
Miriam and Sheldon Adelson became among the largest donors to Jewish and Israeli causes in the world. Through their foundations they gave heavily to Birthright Israel, which funds trips to Israel for young Jewish adults, to Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem, and to medical research, including the Adelson Medical Research Foundation. Their gifts also supported schools in Las Vegas and Israel and a medical school at Ariel University.
Adelson is one of the biggest political donors in the United States, mainly to Republican candidates and committees. She gave large sums to groups supporting Donald Trump, who awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2018. She is also an outspoken supporter of Israel, and her newspaper has been an influential voice in Israeli politics. She holds both Israeli and American citizenship.