Steve Wynn Net Worth: How Much Bank Balance Steve Holds?

Steve Wynn Net Worth

Steve Wynn is a casino resort and real estate developer based in the United States. He is also an avid art collector and has a net worth of $3.1 billion. The personal and professional contributions that Wynn has made to both the Las Vegas Strip and the city as a whole have made a significant impact on the city’s economic prospects for the foreseeable future.

And his life story is the perfect metaphor for Las Vegas itself; where else could someone make a bet of $45,000 and watch it grow into a fortune of $3.1 billion? His work on The Golden Nugget, The Mirage, Treasure Island, The Bellagio, The Wynn, and Encore are among his most notable achievements.

Steve Wynn Early Life

In New Haven, Connecticut, on January 27, 1942, Steve Wynn was given the name Stephen Alan Weinberg at the time of his birth. On the East Coast, his father Michael owned a string of bingo halls that were operating illegally.

In 1946, in order to protect his Jewish heritage from potential persecution, he gave his family the surname Wynn. The Wynn family relocated to Las Vegas in 1952 so that Mike Wynn’s father could take over management of the bingo parlour at the Silver Slipper casino, which was located on the Strip.

However, after only a month in business, he was forced out of business because the bingo games at the Golden Nugget in the heart of Las Vegas were so much more popular. The Wynns uprooted their lives and moved to Maryland after the failure of their bingo parlour.

Wynn attended the University of Pennsylvania to earn his bachelor’s degree in English literature. During his time at the university, he was actively involved in the Sigma Alpha Mu fraternity.

Wynn’s father passed away in 1963, just a few short months before Wynn graduated from Penn. His father left behind gambling debts totaling $350,000.

Wynn was planning on attending Yale Law School for her legal education, but ultimately she decided against it. Instead, he took over the family business in Waysons Corner, Maryland, which was located in the state of Maryland.

Wynn was in charge of running the game and calling the numbers, while his then-wife Elaine was in charge of handling the money. Steve was able to network with a lot of his father’s old business contacts thanks to the fact that he ran the parlour.

Among these contacts were a number of long-time gamblers and characters with ties to the Mafia. Through his interactions with these individuals in the 1960s, he was eventually introduced to Maurice Friedman, who was another one of his father’s lifelong friends.

Friedman, who resided in Las Vegas at the time, was later connected to a Mafia faction in the city of Detroit. (It should be brought to everyone’s attention that Steve Wynn has in no way been associated with organised crime.)

After witnessing his father and other friends lose money at gambling for a number of years, Steve Wynn arrived at a very straightforward realisation. To quote him directly: “This demonstrated to me at a very young age that the only way to make money in a casino was to own one.”

Steve Wynn Career

In 1965, Steve Wynn bought a three percent stake in the Frontier Hotel on the Las Vegas Strip with the help of Friedman’s connections and a loan of thirty thousand dollars from a family friend. The entire investment for this endeavour came to $45,000.

Soon after that, he took out another loan from a Las Vegas bank in the amount of $30,000 in order to purchase an additional 2% ownership stake in the hotel and casino.

Steve was able to qualify for a small portion of the gambling profits made by the Frontier because he owned this number of shares. The year 1967 marked the year that Steve and Elaine Wynn made their move to Las Vegas. At the age of 25, he was promoted to the role of slot and casino manager at the Frontier.

However, within a matter of weeks, Friedman was linked to a card cheating scheme in the state of California, and it was revealed that he had connections to the Detroit Mafia. The hotel and casino at The Frontier was quickly sold to Howard Hughes for a price of 24 million dollars by the investors in the property.

Steve did not see any significant income from the sale because he was only entitled to gambling profits and he was a minority investor.

After the sale of Frontier, Wynn went through a period of transition during which he was involved in the production of lounge acts for casinos. He desired more, and in 1969, at the age of 27, he would have a meeting with a Las Vegas banker by the name of E. Parry Thomas.

This encounter would prove to be fateful. Thomas was the CEO of Valley Bank, which was essentially the Bank of America of Las Vegas because the bank’s branches were located on virtually every street corner.

Over the course of many years, Valley Bank earned a strong reputation for being the only local financial institution willing to extend loans to casinos. Wynn was given a position with Best Brands as their distributor for the state of Nevada thanks to Thomas. Wynn was able to purchase the business thanks to the credit extended to him by Valley Bank.

In 1970, Wynn paid $154,000 to purchase ten acres of land located off of the Las Vegas Strip. Thomas provided him with a loan of $400,000 so that he could construct a liquor warehouse there. After just one year, Wynn made a profit of more than $70,000 by selling the warehouse along with Best Brands. His portion of the profit from that transaction was $170,000.

Wynn was able to parlay the profits he made from a land deal involving Howard Hughes and Caesars Palace into a controlling interest in the Golden Nugget Las Vegas in 1971. The Golden Nugget Las Vegas is a landmark in the downtown area of Las Vegas and is one of the oldest casinos in the city. Wynn transformed the Golden Nugget from a gambling hall into a resort hotel and casino, which resulted in enormous success for all involved in the transformation.

In doing so, he brought a new clientele of upscale individuals to the downtown area of Las Vegas. In 1977, he opened the doors to the first hotel tower at the Golden Nugget, which was followed by several more.

The Mirage was Wynn’s first major casino on the Las Vegas Strip, and its opening in November 1989 was met with a great deal of fanfare. Wynn was a part of the planning and building of a casino for the very first time during this project.

The hotel, which featured an active volcano and was themed after the South Pacific, was the spark that set off a construction boom on the Strip that was worth $12 billion. In October of 1998, Wynn opened the even more extravagant Bellagio, a resort and casino that cost $1.6 billion to build. The Bellagio was the most expensive hotel in the world when it first opened its doors in 1993.

Encore Las Vegas, the most recent addition to Wynn’s portfolio of resorts, first opened its doors right before Christmas in 2008. Although they are two separate hotels, Encore and Wynn Las Vegas share the same property, and the tower of Encore was designed to resemble that of the Wynn Las Vegas tower. The resort and casino were built from the ground up over the course of two years at a cost of $2.3 billion.

Wynn brought his casino and resort empire to Macau in 2006 with the opening of the Wynn Macau, and then again in 2010 with the opening of the Encore Macau. In 2016, Wynn officially inaugurated the Wynn Palace in China.

In 2018, it was reported that dozens of current and former employees of Steve Wynn’s had come forward to reveal a pattern of sexual misconduct on his part. As a result of the allegations that were made against him, he resigned from his position as CEO of Wynn Resorts at the beginning of February 2018. He denies all allegations.

Steve Wynn Personal Life

In 1963, Steve Wynn tied the knot with Elaine Pascal. They have a daughter named Kevyn who was born in 1967 and another named Gillian (1969). In 1986, Steve and Elaine divorced; they remarried in 1991; and then they divorced for a second time in 2010.

Steve Wynn formerly resided in a private villa at Wynn Las Vegas, while Elaine Wynn resided in the couple’s mansion located within the Las Vegas development of Southern Highlands Golf Club. Both homes were located in the Wynn Las Vegas resort.

In 1993, Kevyn Wynn was taken hostage, and in order to secure her safe return, Wynn paid a ransom of $1.45 million. One of the kidnappers was caught while attempting to purchase a Ferrari with cash in Newport Beach, California. The city is located in the state of California. Several hours later, Kevyn was discovered safe and sound.

Wynn tied the knot with Andrea Hissom in a ceremony that took place at the Wynn Las Vegas on April 30, 2011.

Steve Wynn is afflicted with retinitis pigmentosa, an eye condition that causes progressive vision loss.

Wynn holds dual citizenship in the United States and Monaco at this time.

In the year 2010, Wynn made the decision to switch to a vegan diet. Wynn claims that a conversation with a guest on his yacht in St. Tropez about the negative effects of eating meat on the environment and one’s health was the impetus for his transition to a vegan diet. After Wynn converted to veganism, he declared that he would make all of his restaurants offer vegan options on their menus.

Steve Wynn Art Collection

The masterpiece by Picasso known as Le Rêve serves as the focal point of Wynn’s extensive art collection. In 2001, Wynn made the purchase of the painting. According to reports from 2006, Wynn intended to sell it for a price of 139 million dollars, which would have been the highest price ever paid for any piece of art at the time. Nevertheless, Wynn managed to accidentally put his elbow through the painting on one occasion when he was showing it off to Nora Ephron and Barbara Walters. The damage caused the sale to be cancelled, and the cost to repair it was $90,000. In the end, he was able to sell Le Rêve in 2013 for a total of $155 million.

Wynn’s art collection also features three paintings by J.M.W. Turner that cost him a combined $38.5 million: Guidecca, La Donna Della Salute, and San Giorgi. He also owns a Rembrandt that cost him $33.2 million, as well as several works by Claude Monet, and in 2012, he paid approximately $33.6 million for Jeff Koons’ Tulips.

Steve Wynn Personal Property

In 2015, Steve purchased a nearly 3-acre estate in Beverly Hills for a total price of $48 million. The subsequent extensive remodelling cost him years of his life and a great many millions of dollars. Maurice Marciano, a co-founder of Guess?, originally built the main house, which spans an area of 27,000 square feet and was completed in the 1990s. In March of 2020, Wynn placed the residence on the market with an asking price of $135 million.

Steve has a sizable mansion inside of a private and guarded country club in Las Vegas, which serves as his official residence for tax purposes. He paid a cool $70 million for the penthouse at the Ritz-Carlton in New York City when he purchased it in 2012, and he is the owner of this property. In the state of Florida, he is the proprietor of an oceanfront mansion in Palm Beach that he purchased in 2019 for the price of $40 million. Last but not least, Steve is the owner of a ski compound in Sun Valley, Idaho, that is 25,000 square feet in size.

Steve is the proud owner of an impressive real estate portfolio, but he also has a yacht called Aquarius, which is valued at $215 million and has a helicopter landing pad, a beauty salon, and a full-time crew of 30 people.