After driving 9 hours south from Boise to Las Vegas, I'm left with a few thoughts.
First, there is no better feeling than being exhausted but coming to a clean room with a comfortable bed.
Second, driving for 9 hours through the dessert and mountains and then walking through the opulence in the Vegas strip is a surreal feeling -- you've truly found an oasis in the dessert.
Third, the business dynamics of running a casino and resort must be lucrative, but what exactly does it entail?
You'd need to appraise the property which having looked it up, the property held by Venetian Resorts and its Palazzio property totals 17 million square feet. To acquire a property on the Strip, you're looking at about $900/sq foot. Just to acquire the property, you're looking at about $15 billion. However the entire resort was recently purchased by the Sands group for $6.25 billion. In 1999, when the Venetian was first built, it cost $1.5 billion and when it added the Venezia tower which added 1,013 rooms, it cost an extra $45 million. In 2024, it underwent a renovation project that cost $1.5 billion.
As of 2023, the resort generates $4.9 million a day in revenue, so let's round this up to $5 million., which is roughly $1.8 billion in revenue. It is estimated to cost $388 million a year to operate the resort -- which means this enterprise is not only a cash cow, but a great way to generate revenue for any holdings company that needs a steady flow of cash on hand. It starts to make more senbse that this is one of the favorite cash cows of the mob.