Many have compared Las Vegas hotel mogul Steve Wynn with P.T. Barnum, a legendary figure famous for merging showmanship and self-promotion with business savvy. But there is one important difference: Like many entrepreneurs, Barnum treated his business like a child, devoting his entire life to his namesake circus. Wynn has continually proven that he can walk away from his successes and begin anew.

Each time, Wynn has pushed the envelope of “industry norms,” and each time he has learned important lessons, allowing him to come back and outdo his previous efforts. This gift for quitting while ahead, a lesson ironically lost on the Las Vegas visitors who fund his casino hotels, is perhaps Wynn’s most undervalued business skill. Every day the pirate ship he built outside the Treasure Island hotel sinks, but, based on his track record, Wynn will not go down with his ship. Instead, he sails on to a more profitable port of call.

A Gift for All

On his wife’s birthday, in April of this year, Wynn gave the world a gift, his latest casino hotel, costing $2.7 billion. Wynn Las Vegas has 2,700 rooms, 22 restaurants, a golf course, a large spa and high-end shops including a Ferrari/Maserati dealership. For entertainment, Wynn procured a new circus spectacular from luminary Franco Dragone and imported New York’s Tony Award–winning Broadway show Avenue Q.

The resort is overwhelming, but this is nothing new for its creator. Since he moved to Las Vegas in 1963, Wynn has done more than anyone to make Las Vegas what it is today.
Just four years after moving to Sin City, Wynn purchased a 5 percent stake in the Frontier Hotel. Then he sold it almost immediately to Howard Hughes—at a substantial profit.
Thus began a cycle that would become his success story: making shrewd investments, building them up with new ideas, then selling them for a tidy profit. After buying and selling 1.1 key acres to Caesars Palace, Wynn bought nearly 6 percent of the Golden Nugget casino in downtown Vegas.

Though dwarfed in size by newer Strip casinos, and lacking a hotel, it had one attraction for the young developer: plenty of land. Where others saw kitsch, Wynn saw luxury. He completely renovated, replacing the dated Old West theme with marble and brass and adding a 579-room hotel. Doubters thought it too big and lavish for the decaying downtown, but Wynn’s bottom line proved them wrong.

Starting with a Nugget

Wynn’s Golden Nugget, Inc. (renamed Mirage Resorts, Inc. in 1991) was among the first publicly traded companies in a traditionally privately owned industry. That meant he could more easily raise capital. “I think probably we brought to the party the idea that you could dedicate more capital, more quality to one of these places than anybody had tried to do before me,” Wynn told the Chicago Tribune a decade ago. “Capital markets had changed and big money was available. There was no big money available in the old days.”

Next came the Golden Nugget Atlantic City. Relocating his luxury gaming concept, he added some new wrinkles with the $160 million property, including his now-trademark free, flashy entertainment to draw in visitors and opulent high-roller suites to woo the biggest gamblers. Once again the money followed, and less than six years later, he sold the casino to Bally’s for the then-unheard-of sum of $440 million.

Wynn used his proceeds from that deal to build the world’s largest hotel, the $620 million Mirage. The Mirage’s signature attraction, the famous fire-spewing volcano outside, stopped strolling tourists in their tracks. He swapped visiting entertainers for in-house illusionists Siegfried & Roy. But his uniquely profitable new strategy was to run lodging and food operations in the black in a city where using these as loss leaders was standard operating procedure.

“He may call this the hotel business,” Kenneth Feld, Barnum’s successor as owner of Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus, once told the Los Angeles Times. “But he’s in the entertainment business, and he stands up there with Michael Eisner and Steve Spielberg for their combination of vision and the ability to make it happen.”

Debunking Conventional Wisdom

Critics were stunned by the nearly $1 million a day the hotel needed to gross to cover operations and debt service, but in its first month it racked up a stunning $40 million in gaming revenue alone. Conventional wisdom said that the Mirage couldn’t make it, but once again Wynn’s innovation won out over convention. In 1992, Fortune magazine declared him America’s highest-paid corporate executive, with salary and benefits of nearly $35 million. Wynn followed up the Mirage’s success with two more mega-resorts, Treasure Island (now TI) and the Bellagio.

In both, he built on his proven combination of sidewalk attractions and high-roller wooing, but he continued to tinker, adding Vegas’ first Cirque du Soleil show at Treasure Island. At Bellagio, he was the first to bring in world-famous celebrity chefs to create a gastronomic destination. Mirage Resorts added casinos in Laughlin, Nev., and Biloxi, Miss., before Wynn sold the company in 2000 for $6.7 billion to Kirk Kerkorian, who had by then built the new world’s largest hotel, the MGM Grand.

What’s in a Name?

Many assumed that Wynn, who suffers from an incurable degenerative eye disease, was on the brink of retiring. But when the Desert Inn, a choice piece of Strip real estate, came up for sale in 2000, Wynn snapped it up for $270 million and erected his first namesake resort.

Wynn Las Vegas seems to be a departure from his proven strategy: It has no theme or gimmick to draw tourists in. In an interview with the Las Vegas Sun, Wynn recently said, “They are wonderful tourist attractions, but there is no franchise in the tourist attraction. There is a franchise in a guest, and a guest is something that happens inside. You don’t design a hotel from the outside looking in as I did with the other three. You design a hotel from the inside looking out. Wynn Las Vegas is a completely different approach.”

What does this radical departure in approach mean? Wynn himself has implied that he was just “practicing” with his past projects. And the fact that he opted to attach his name to this project for the first time may signify that he thinks he’s finally found the right formula. If he has, maybe he’ll find it harder to walk away this time.

The Other Vegas Moguls

Las Vegas was born in 1905, a century ago. But it wasn’t until the 1960s that powerful developers began to transform the landscape into modern Vegas.

Billionaire eccentric Howard Hughes moved to Las Vegas and went on a shopping spree, buying the Desert Inn, Sands, Castaways, Silver Slipper, Frontier (from Wynn’s group) and Landmark.

Like Wynn, Kirk Kerkorian, “the father of the Las Vegas mega-resort,” bought and sold parcels before building his first hotel, the International (now the Las Vegas Hilton). He next bought the Flamingo and built the original MGM Grand, now Bally’s. After selling these three hotels to Hilton, he built the current MGM Grand, the largest hotel in the world, then acquired Mirage Resorts. He just bought Mandalay Group (Mandalay Bay, Luxor and Excalibur), giving him more than 20,000 Vegas rooms.

When Jay Sarno arrived, Las Vegas hotels were themed in name only, but he changed that forever in 1964 when he built Caesars Palace. From uniforms to architecture, it was Roman throughout. He followed up Caesars with another theme casino, Circus Circus.

The just-off-the-Strip Palms Casino Hotel is just the beginning for the Maloof family. Siblings Joe, Gavin, George, Phil and Adrienne, and their mother, also own the NBA Sacramento Kings basketball team plus a WNBA and WISL team. These moguls-in-the-making are estimated to be worth about $1 billion.

Room Rank

In Sin City, nothing succeeds like excess, and 2005 is projected to be yet another record year for tourism with an estimated 38.2 million visitors, each staying an average of almost five days. So, where do they all stay? At some of the world’s largest hotels.*

Rank/Hotel - Rooms
1. MGM Grand - 5,005
2. Luxor - 4,408
3. Mandalay Bay - 4,341**
4. Venetian - 4,049***
5. Excalibur - 4,008
6. Bellagio - 3,993
7. Circus Circus - 3,774
8. Flamingo - 3,565
9. Caesars Palace - 3,349**
10. Mirage - 3,044
11. Monte Carlo - 3,002
12. Las Vegas Hilton - 2,956
13. Paris Las Vegas - 2,916
14. TI (Treasure Island) - 2,885
15. Bally’s - 2,814
16. Wynn Las Vegas - 2,716
17. Imperial Palace - 2,635
18. Harrah’s - 2,579
19. Rio - 2,569***
20. Aladdin - 2,567

*This ranking is continually shifting with expansions and reductions, new hotels and even the definition of hotels.
**Includes new tower
***All suites

Wynn Las Vegas and the Competition

How does the new casino hotel stack up against its biggest rivals?

With 2,700 rooms, 45 spa treatment rooms, 22 restaurants, 200,000 square feet of meeting space and about a dozen boutiques, Wynn Las Vegas sounds huge, but it actually falls into the middle tier of top Vegas casino resorts in size. For example, the largest, MGM Grand, has more than 5,000 rooms. What sets Wynn apart is its upscale guestrooms, featuring flat-screen TVs and fine European linens; its cast of original gourmet restaurants; its golf course (it’s the only Strip casino with its own course); and its own Broadway show, moved from, rather than copied from, New York.

Right next door is one of Wynn’s major competitors, the Venetian, which boasts an Italian theme throughout, right down to canals with gondoliers and a re-creation of the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel over the front desk. It also has an impressive array of shops and clones of famous restaurants. But the Venetian’s highlight is its spacious rooms, the only all-suite property on the Strip.

Wynn’s former prized asset, the Bellagio, is now a top foe. The Bellagio’s strongest suit is its dining scene, with re-creations of some of America’s greatest eateries, and a brand-new spa. The dancing fountain show is quite popular, but as Wynn now points out, you don’t have to go in to enjoy it.

Although it’s the world’s largest hotel, the MGM Grand has a lot more going for it than bulk. Once a child-friendly Wizard of Oz–themed hotel with amusement park, MGM has spent a lot of money redefining itself for adults. One of those changes is Skylofts, a luxury boutique hotel within the hotel. Skylofts has the best standard rooms in the city. The MGM Grand also has several excellent new restaurants, hot nightclubs and a brand-new poker room and sports book with the city’s first skyboxes. MGM has gone upscale just in time to joust with Wynn Las Vegas.

The first true theme hotel in the city, Caesars Palace, has not been standing still. A new, more luxurious wing with more than a 1,000 rooms just opened, and the city’s leading casino retail space, the Forum Shops, recently added a new wing.

At the far end of the Strip lies Mandalay Bay, one of Wynn’s best-armed competitors. Mandalay Bay has it all: great restaurants at all price points, a popular stage show in Mamma Mia!, the top pool complex in the city, several trendy clubs, and a newer upscale boutique hotel, THEhotel, an all-suite property with a private entrance. It also is connected to the small, non-gaming Four Seasons, easily the best luxury hotel in the city.