Gambling has created some of the biggest personal fortunes in business. Casino resorts, gaming machine factories, online sportsbooks and poker rooms have all turned their founders into billionaires. Luck had surprisingly little to do with it. In almost every case, the money came from spotting a shift in the market early and executing on it relentlessly.
Below are five of the industry's best-known fortunes, how they were built and what operators can take from each story. Wealth estimates rise and fall with share prices and deals, so read the figures as indicative rather than as a current ranking.
Sheldon Adelson: from trade shows to integrated resorts
Sheldon Adelson, who died in January 2021, turned Las Vegas Sands into one of the world's largest casino resort companies. He grew up in a poor family in Boston, started earning money as a boy by selling newspapers and went on to run a string of small businesses.
His breakthrough came outside gambling. He co-founded COMDEX, the computer industry trade show, and its sale in the mid-1990s gave him capital for far bigger projects. In 1989 he had bought the Sands hotel and casino in Las Vegas; he later demolished it and in 1999 opened The Venetian on the site, complete with indoor canals and gondolas modelled on Venice.
The model he championed, the integrated resort that combines hotel rooms, convention space, shopping and gaming, later drove the company's expansion into Macau and Singapore. His fortune was estimated at more than $30 billion when he died, and his family remained the company's largest shareholders.
Lesson for operators: Adelson's resorts gave visitors many reasons to come besides the gaming floor. Online, the equivalent is a product mix and content plan that keeps players engaged beyond a single game.
Lui Che Woo: a builder who bet on Macau
Lui Che Woo was born in Guangdong in 1929 and moved to Hong Kong as a child, where he lived through the hardship of the war years. He built his first fortune in quarrying, construction materials and property through K. Wah Group.
His move into gaming came with Macau's liberalisation in 2002, when the government ended the decades-long casino monopoly and awarded new gaming concessions. Galaxy Entertainment Group won one of them and bet heavily on Macau's transformation into a resort destination. Its flagship Galaxy Macau resort opened on Cotai in 2011.
Lui has regularly appeared among Hong Kong's wealthiest people, and he is also known for founding the LUI Che Woo Prize, which honours contributions to world civilisation.
Lesson for operators: Lui entered gaming late, but at the exact moment a market opened. Timing a licence application to a newly regulated market can matter as much as the product itself.
Johann Graf: building Novomatic from amusement machines
Johann Graf grew up in post-war Austria and trained as a butcher before going into business for himself. In the 1970s he began importing and distributing pinball and amusement machines, which taught him how players behave and how arcade owners make money.
In 1980 he founded Novomatic, which began producing its own gaming machines. The company grew into an international group that builds land-based terminals, runs casinos and arcades and, through its online arm Greentube, supplies video slots to online casinos. His stake made him one of Austria's richest people, with a fortune estimated in the billions of dollars.
Lesson for operators: Graf understood the people using his machines before he started building them. Platforms and studios that stay close to real operations tend to make the products operators actually need.
Denise Coates: taking a family betting business online
Denise Coates grew up around her father Peter Coates's chain of betting shops in Stoke-on-Trent and joined the business after studying econometrics. In 2000 she bought the bet365 domain name, and in 2001 she launched the online sportsbook from a portable building in a car park.
Her decisive move came in 2005, when the family sold its betting shops to concentrate entirely on online betting. The bet paid off: bet365 grew into one of the world's largest online gambling companies, with in-play betting and live streaming at the heart of its product, and it remains in the hands of the Coates family.
Her pay has regularly made headlines as among the highest of any British executive, running to hundreds of millions of pounds in some years.
Lesson for operators: Coates went all in on online years before most rivals were willing to give up retail. Committing early to a new channel, and owning the product rather than outsourcing it, built a lead that lasted.
Mark Scheinberg: the PokerStars fortune
Mark Scheinberg was born in Israel and moved to Canada with his family. In 2001 he and his father, Isai, launched PokerStars, which arrived just ahead of the online poker boom and grew into the world's largest poker site.
Its success rested on dependable software, a deep tournament schedule and events that players planned their year around, such as the World Championship of Online Poker, held since 2002. In 2014 the family sold the business to Amaya Gaming in a deal worth about $4.9 billion, securing Scheinberg's place among the industry's richest people.
Lesson for operators: PokerStars won on product quality and community. Recurring tournaments, leaderboards and events still create the habits that keep players returning.
What these fortunes have in common
Each story is different, yet the same patterns run through all five:
- Early moves into new channels or markets: Macau after liberalisation, online sports betting, online poker.
- Control of the product: Novomatic built its own machines, bet365 developed its own sportsbook technology and PokerStars wrote its own software.
- Experience from elsewhere: trade shows, construction, machine distribution and retail bookmaking gave the founders skills their rivals lacked.
- Long-term ownership: most of these businesses stayed under founder or family control for decades, which allowed patient investment.
Today's operators do not need to build everything themselves to apply these lessons. A turnkey casino platform takes care of the technology, so you can focus on the timing, brand and player experience that set these founders apart. If you are weighing up a launch, our guide on how to start an online casino is a good place to begin.
Written and reviewed by the iGaming Software Solutions Editorial Team.
