Las Vegas Power Players

By Laura A. Locke/Las Vegas

MGM MIRAGE Kirk Kerkorian

If other casino impresarios have brought sophistication to the new Las Vegas, MGM Mirage majority shareholder Kirk Kerkorian, 87, has supplied the scale. On three separate occasions over the past 35 years, the low-key billionaire investor has built the world's largest hotel on the Strip, most recently the mammoth 5,034-room MGM Grand in 1993. In the past five years, Kerkorian has ushered in a wave of consolidation, snapping up Steve Wynn's Mirage Resorts in 2000 and just last month agreeing to buy Mandalay Resort Group for $7.9 billion, including debt. A World War II pilot who started his Vegas career by building a $100 million charter-flight business, Kerkorian will soon control half of the Strip's 75,000 rooms.

While Kerkorian spends most of his time at home in Beverly Hills, Calif., plotting his next big deal, he leaves the day-to-day management of his empire to MGM Mirage CEO Terry Lanni, 61, a veteran casino executive who, like his boss, largely shuns the limelight. In a town famous for flashy characters, Lanni, who collects classic sports cars and carved wooden boxes in his spare time, has earned a reputation for integrity. Your good name, he insists, "is the one thing you can't afford to lose." Kerkorian is famous for having "ice water in his veins," as one former rival says. As the competition in Vegas builds, that should come in handy.

WYNN RESORTS Steve Wynn

More so than most Vegas showmen, casino mogul Steve Wynn, 62, has helped create the postmodern face of Sin City, replacing plain-vanilla gambling with entertainment destinations like the elegant Bellagio, the luxurious Mirage and the fanciful Treasure Island. So it's a noteworthy change of tone that this pioneer is now doing his best to hide it. His first creation since selling his Mirage empire to MGM Grand for $6.4 billion in 2000, the $2.6 billion bronze-toned Wynn Las Vegas casino and resort is designed to provide a rarefied air of seclusion.

Wynn, who suffers from a degenerative eye disease, has managed his most ambitious project ever with customary painstaking attention to detail--he is known to call colleagues in the middle of the night to share his latest brainstorms. In addition to the first-class luxury retail brands you would expect to find (Cartier, Chanel, Louis Vuitton), his shops will offer an array of his own private-label products. Also on display in a gallery will be selected works from the world-class art collection that was prominently featured at the Bellagio. (Wynn recently paid $8.8 million for a John Singer Sargent portrait of Robert Louis Stevenson.) While rival executives tend to mock his Renaissance-man profile, what really rankles them is his aggressive show-stealing tendencies. As Wynn's friend and fellow developer Irwin Molasky says, "Everyone is spending time anticipating and reacting to his next move." They are finding that Wynn always seems to be a few steps ahead.

LAS VEGAS SANDS Sheldon Adelson

In a city chock full of big-time gamblers, Sheldon Adelson, 70, stands out for his bold bets. "Either I'm the stupidest guy around or the biggest crapshooter in town," he said before opening his $1.5 billion Venetian mega-resort in 1999, complete with canals, gondola rides and its own convention center next door. Five years later, the Venetian is one of Sin City's most profitable hotels, and Adelson has led Vegas' transformation into a business destination.

A longtime entrepreneur who is worth an estimated $1.8 billion, Adelson isn't resting on his laurels. With the help of his chief lieutenant, William Weidner, he just opened Asia's first Las Vegas--style casino (see following story), he's about to break ground on a $1.6 billion resort near the Venetian, and he may soon take public his privately held company, Las Vegas Sands, Inc., which could be valued at more than $4 billion.

Thanks to his antiunion stance and outspokenness, Adelson isn't exactly the most popular guy in town. But the son of a Boston cabby doesn't have to worry much about drawing a crowd; almost everywhere he and his wife Miriam go, they are escorted by a contingent of ex-Mossad Israeli intelligence agents. Even for Adelson, some things are better not left to chance.

HARRAH'S Gary Loveman

He will soon be the highest roller in the gaming industry--but Gary Loveman, 44, is already the unlikeliest. Only several years ago, Loveman was a professor at Harvard Business School, specializing in the service economy. Now he's applying some of those theories about retail and customer loyalty to Harrah's Entertainment, which, after last week's $9.25 billion--including debt--deal for Caesars Entertainment is consummated, will cement its position as the world's biggest casino operator.

With a Ph.D. in economics, Loveman knows how to use data to learn more than anybody else about his customers. Instead of catering to big spenders, he has focused Harrah's on the small-time, frequent gamblers who come to play the slots at his many riverboat and Indian casinos around the U.S. He's betting that he can draw many of those people to his newly acquired properties on the Strip. Loveman still commutes to Vegas from Boston, and he doesn't care much for gambling himself. But, as he put it recently, "I love what I'm doing because fundamentally it's mathematics." And so far at least, the numbers keep adding up. --By Laura A. Locke/Las Vegas