They don’t make super-billionaires like they used to, at least in Las Vegas. That’s one lesson to draw from the newest edition of the Forbes 400 list, which came out earlier this month. The number of local big billies dropped from six to five. In 2016, the year I became New To Law Vegas, the count was nine. In recent years it’s been as low as two.
But the four Vegans who managed to stay on the list this year and last wildly outperformed the 396 other swells gracing the celebrated list of the country’s heaviest hitters. Collectively, the net worth of of these locals totaled $68.9 billion, a rise of 39%. The Forbes 400 as as whole: up a mere 22.%.
So here’s the Las Vegas contingent:
–Miriam Adelson, 79, ranked No. 25 with an inherited casino family fortune (and Las Vegas Review-Journal ownership) valued at $37.9. billion, improved from $29.9 billion and No. 32 last year . Her net worth increased by more than the individual GDP of as many as 40 countries!
–Walmart heiress Nancy Walton Laurie, 74, ranked No. 66 at $15.6 billion, up from with $12.7 billion, better than $9.3 billion and No. 69 last year.
–Panda Express husband-and-wife owners Andrew Cherng, 78, and Peggy Cherng, 77, both ranked No. 187 with $7.7 billion each–that’s $15.4 for the household–much better than last’s year No. 359 and $3.4 billion each. up from $6.2 billion.
–On-and-off listee Phil Ruffin, 90, casino tycoon and half-owner with Trump of the Trump International Hotel Las Vegas, ranked No. 325 at $4.7 billion. He wasn’t on last year’s list because his net worth of $2.7 billion was considered by Forbes a little too light.
Two other casino types, brothers Frank Fertitta III, 63, and Lorenzo Fertitta, 56, both ranked No. 388 last year with $3.4 billion each, missed the cut this year. Forbes pegged their net worth at $3.7 billion each, bu the cutoff rose to $3.8 billion.
I used the phrase “big billies” earlier because the U.S. is now so lousy with 10-digit-net-worth types that most of them can’t make the cut. When Donald J. Trump lied his way onto the first Forbes 400 list in 1982–he falsely said he owned half his father’s real estate business when in fact the correct amount was 0%–the cut-off, or No. 400, was a mere $100 million and the richest person, an 85-year-old shipping magnate no one had ever heard of, was worth $2 billion. Now the cut-off is $3.8 billion, and the richest on the list, at a whopping $$428 billion, is Elon Musk. You’ve probably head of him.
Thanks to crypto and what some critics might call undue pressure and government actions favoring his private interests, Trump has done okay, too. Forbes put him at No. 201, with a net worth of $7.3 billion, triple his $2.3 billion valuation last year.
Up north, tiny ol’ Reno had four big billies, just one fewer than Las Vegas, as follows:
–Computer software man David Duffield, 85, ranked No. 91 with $12.8 billion, down from $14.3 billion and No. 55 last year. He was the only big billie to decline.
–Computer software man Jay Chaudhry, 66, ranked No. 65 at $15.7 billion, better than No. 84 and $11.4 billion last year.
–Wife-and-husband aerospace types Eren Ozmen and Fatih Ozmen, both 67: she at No. 308 at $4.9 billion billion, up from $3.4 billion; he at No. 325 $4.7 billion, up from $3.3 billion.
The very first Forbes 400 list in 1982 had four entries with at least part-time Nevada residences, all in the Las Vegas area. They were:
–Forrest Mars Sr., then 78, who had headed the Mars. Inc. candy company. He was pegged at $1 billion (about $3.3 billion in today’s dollars). He divided his time between Henderson and Virginia.
–Donald W. Reynolds, then 75. His media empire, which included the Las Vegas Review-Journal, was estimated at $200 million (nearly $800 million in today’s dollars). He was listed as living in Las Vegas and Arkansas. (After his death in 1993, the estate sold the paper to another Arkansas tycoon, who in 2015 sold it to the family of Miriam Adelson.)
–Kirk Kerkorian, then 65, listed as a “trader” who owned the various MGM properties. His net worth was estimated at $133 million (about $450 million in today’s dollars). His name now graces the medical school at UNLV.
—Morris Barney (Mo) Dalitz, then 83, and worth $110 million (about $370 million now). His fortune was blandly listed in a table as based on “casinos,” but his blurb in the magazine was a little more explicit: “Identified before Kefauver Committee 1951 as participating in formation of national crime syndicate.” Dalitz and Florida’s Meyer Lansky were the only two mobsters on that first list.
Nevada now has one Forbes 400 member for about every 350,000 residents (compared with one for every 221,000 residents in 1982). Still, as was the case in 1982, that’s a ratio now more than twice as dear as the national average, which is one for every 855,000 residents.
But currently, there’s also the fact that Nevada has the country’s second highest unemployment rate among states, at 5.3%. So is there another lesson here?