Sheldon Adelson is now the highest-paid chief executive in the S&P 500, according to Bloomberg.
The multibillionaire has a new employment agreement with Las Vegas Sands, where he is chairman and CEO and controlling shareholder, which raises his annual salary from $1 million to $5 million and includes a bonus hike of 58 percent to $12.5 million if the company beats its EBITDA target.
The agreement is backdated to January 1, so he’s already got the raise, and it’s automatically renewed each year as long as he says so.
The agreement includes $1 million a year in stock options, use of a car and driver, a business jet, $3.4 million for security services for himself and his family and reimbursements of up to $200,000 annually for “personal legal and tax preparation and/or financial planning fees and expenses.”
But it’s all mere pocket change for the 84-year-old casino magnate and Republican mega-donor, whose majority stake in LVS is the foundation for a personal net worth pegged by Bloomberg at $32.6 billion and by Forbes at $35.5 billion, good for 14thon the Forbes 400.
An avowed Zionist and friend of Israel’s controversial Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Adelson has employed that wealth aggressively to advance a pro-Israel agenda in Washington, an anti-union agenda in LVS’s home state of Nevada and to push Congress to enact a federal ban on internet gambling.
He also owns Nevada’s largest daily newspaper, the Las Vegas Review-Journal, and Israel Hayom, a free daily newspaper purported to have the largest readership in Israel.
He was the largest individual donor in U.S. politics in the 2012 election cycle, backing Newt Gingrich’s quixotic quest for the Republican presidential nomination and spending more than $100 million to try to prevent President Obama’s re-election. After largely sitting out the 2016 Republican presidential primaries he went on to contribute $25 million to Donald Trump’s run for the White House and another $40 million to support the party’s 2016 congressional campaigns.
