(LAS VEGAS, NEVADA)—Las Vegas lost yet another brilliant-minded developer. A man with a vision that changed the local scene in Downtown, Las Vegas.
Born in Urbana, Illinois on 12 December 1973, Tony Hsieh died on 27 November 2020 in Bridgeport, Connecticut. Just two weeks and one day from his 47th birthday.
The Las Vegas legendary super-businessman is said to have lost his life from complications of injuries sustained in a Connecticut housefire on 18 November 2020.
Like many sudden deaths of people dying before their time there has been a rush of speculation, sketchy and inaccurate reporting with changes occurring frequently.
We need to wait awhile and allow the family time for healing and privacy. It may be sometime before we have the full, accurate detail of what really happened to Tony Hsieh to take him at such a young age.
Then we will learn the full story.
There are many news reports of the tragedy one can find by simple searches.
There is a lot to learn about Hsieh’s life. Just when he was retiring from Zappos, a company he was CEO at for 21 years, his life was cut short.
Zappos online shoe and clothing company, based in Las Vegas, Nevada, was sold to Amazon in 2009 for over one-billion dollars.
Hsieh stayed on as CEO until on 24 August 2020 when he abruptly retired.
Zappos moved from nearby Henderson, Nevada to Downtown Las Vegas moving into the former Las Vegas City Hall when city officials vacated it after building the new City Hall at 495 South Main Street, Las Vegas.
Smoke inhalation and complications from injuries from the housefire on 18 November 2020 is said to have taken his life. It is said he died peacefully, with his family at his side.
It is always tragic when family loses a loved one, especially during the Christmas season.
I lost nearly my entire family during the Christmas season or near then, and no matter how much time passes there is always memories and moments of missing all those who have since gone.
We pray for Tony Hsieh and his family.
Take a few moments and search the history of this young man who began brilliant financial and business moves from a young age and follow his life to the end.
He was founder and developer of the Downtown Project, a Las Vegas redevelopment and startup company.
Tony Hsieh had just moved to Park City, Utah before the tragedy occurred. He traveled with his brother to Connecticut to visit.
Downtown Las Vegas and the Vegas Valley will mourn and remember Tony Hsieh for a long time to come.
Vegas is not a mill town. Vegas is not a factory town. Nor is it a shipping port or any production of normal manufacturing or services that many American communities have.
Vegas is a tourist town.
When crime rises to the level tourists are scared off and afraid of coming to a tourist town because of the high crime the entire community suffers.
Casinos or more correctly gaming, is the central industry of Las Vegas. Entertainment is another label that identifies the productivity of Vegas Valley.
That means, resorts, hospitality or hotel business and restaurants and all the attractions that feed off the tourism crowds are what pumps the Vegas Valley economy.
The golf courses, the boating and swimming activities in the area lakes, roller-coasters and thrill rides, helicopter and plane rides, airline passenger service bringing people in and out of Vegas, taxi, limousine, and shuttle-bus services, construction and supplies, all generate revenue.
All of these are supported by businesses that feed off the workers, hundreds of thousands of workers, in these industries. The car business, the real estate business and stockbrokers, insurance companies, finance companies, government services, education, the grocery stores, and retail stores. Trucking. Warehousing. Consumer exchanges.
There is the military, nearby Nellis Air Force Base, hospitals, medical health industry, and the lists goes on.
When crime is high, the entire society suffers. Crime cannot be tolerated or sustained. If it is, Vegas will surely die a premature death without maturing to the fruitful productivity of the industries that were designed to succeed.
The multi-billion-dollar casino business is fragile to crime and discouraging things like pandemics.
Businesses foster businesses. Productivity means paychecks and money in people’s pockets. Money to spend. Livelihoods to be earned. That must be protected at all costs.
Las Vegas Casinos in Intensive Care on Life Support
The leftist-supporting casino executives may have shot themselves, not in the foot, but in the head. Brian Greenspun, the leader of leftist media in Las Vegas has spun out multiples of anti-Trump publications and he singly may have doomed the town with his leftist Marxist rhetoric.
Of course, the communist-like Governor Steve Sisolak, a longtime Clark County Commissioner who failed to curb the escalation of human trafficking, marketing of illegal escort services, fronts for prostitution, growth of illegal invaders populating the town and multiple other criminal activities in the Vegas Valley is allied with Brian Greenspun, kingsh*t CEO, Publisher and Editor of Greenspun Media Group.
Between the two, it is safe to say, Las Vegas will fall not to a recession, but a full-blown depression unlike any it has ever seen in its history.
Jokers with a pair of dice in their hands.
But people will not only keep doing business with these two jokers in the stacked deck, they will also keep supporting them until the dealing is done and there isn’t any more options left for a town that will soon be dying.
Some of the most well-known, notorious casino magnates, top executives and years-long leading managers, CEOs and chairmen have already bailed out, or have been pushed out and moved on reaping multi-million-dollar severance pays.
Steve Wynn, one of the most brilliant minds in developing the modern-day Vegas was removed from his throne over scandals. Rather the allegations against Wynn were true or not doesn’t matter, it was never a trial in a court of law, it was a trial in the media and by the powers that be. Whatever. The community lost one of the greatest masterminds in Vegas maneuverability. A resort genius who developed some of prime, most profitable properties in the Vegas Valley.
Sheldon Adelson, Sands Resort tycoon says the casino group is up for sale, eyeing a six billion dollar price tag for the Venetian and Palazzo. Adelson, a Trump supporter, and the family head of the most recent owners of the Las Vegas Review Journal maybe bailing out while the bailing is good.
Many other Vegas Valley properties not mentioned in this post are downsizing, slowing down, limiting operations, laying off, closing or changing hands, too. That’s a big tell even a bad gambler can read.
The Review Journal, by the way, ironically, delivers the Greenspun group’s Las Vegas Sun print newspaper.
Jim Murren, longtime MGM’s top executive stepped down earlier this year.
He recently put his mansion on the market for 10.5 million dollars. Murren is another anti-Trump voicepiece who just a few days ago penned a “Vote for Biden” piece in the Greenspun Las Vegas Sun with an introduction by Brian Greenspun: Murren’s Column in the Las Vegas Sun
With Murren, Wynn and Adelson gone and many other longtime casino barons, recently gone from the Vegas scene, Vegas is in the hands of amateurs and the inexperience. It’s anyone’s guess where the numbers land from here on in. Like a pair of dice tossed across a crap table, the house can call, “Seven out, line away,” or “Pay the don’ts.”
When a few years ago, Vegas shifted from safe, paid-off multi-million-dollar casinos with little or no debt to heavily mortgaged, mega resorts financed with heavy-debt, multi-billion-dollar casinos the stakes increased. The risks magnified.
The house went all in with a pair of duces against the hand of nature’s economics sequental royal flush.
In the heyday of Vegas there was no such thing as a day dark or when a casino was shut down and none were operating. The only time I recall in Vegas Valley history, except for recently, where the casinos on the Strip turned out the lights and went dark was when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated on 22 November 1963.
Then there were lights out for Earth Day, but the casinos were open and operating, nevertheless.
Despite some record-breaking visitor totals in recent months, Las Vegas Strip casinos are not only hurting, but they are also on life support. The blame? Covid 19 Virus.
But there is more to it than Covid 19, much more.
The left has set the mood for massive violence in the country and the Las Vegas Strip has not been immune. The Strip has seen an escalation in crime and violence that has hit right in the heart of the Vegas Valley cash cow.
Visitors and tourists are not going to risk their lives or their families in a town where what happens here, doesn’t stay here any more. Violence drives any conscious human being away to safer destinations.
Greenspun is a lefty anti-Trump mouthpiece that just last week published the Las Vegas Weekly with a cover, that mocks President Trump and yields huge headlines, END THIS CHAOS. Vote.
This week’s edition talks about a divided nation and blames President Trump.
The division of this nation began with Obama and Joe Biden before Trump ever took office and continued every second by the forces of the left until this very moment.
Publications like Greenspun and his media group’s are the epitome of chaos.
Chaos has spilled over in multiple Las Vegas casinos recently, downtown and on the Strip.
Not only fist fights, gang brawls, but gun play and knives being involved, too. It will get worst. Much worst.
The Wynn property was a recent victim of violence and so were several Strip properties, like Paris.
The leftist politicians, across the nation, have repeatedly called for violence against Trump supporters and right-wing Americans with no limitation on that violence.
I am not going to discuss the BLM and Antifa violence that has raged across America, fully with left-wing support and endorsement, you all know where that leads. You all know what it is all about. It is perfectly okay to riot, to burn down innocent people’s businesses and to injure and kill people. To destroy public and private property. To disobey police orders, to resist, to revolt, to…. create chaos.
The chaos Brian Greenspun’s lefty rags blame on Trump was started by the leftwing comrades long before Trump came on the scene.
Obama, Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton and many other leftwing politicians led the movement of that chaos.
The Vegas Valley felt the crushing blows of that chaos in the Obama-Biden Great Recession that were blamed on Bush.
You reap what you sow. You get what you ask for.
And yet, they call Trump the divider, the hater.
But what are you going to do when it lands back on your own lap and your own business gets burned down? Cry for the police you so wantonly condemned and wanted to defund?
Sisolak Big Shot governor now, issues multiple executive orders, and not only closed down businesses directly causing many of them to fold, issued social distances, mandatory wearing personal protection equipment but failing to provide any legal penalties for people who fail to comply. “Resistors.”
All the time people are invading my safe space, and yet short of shooting them in the head to get them to comply they stand there aggressively telling me to go F myself.
Sisolak failed to provide mandatory felony prison sentences for those big tough guys that like to bully elders who wouldn’t give one damn putting them in a body bag should they get too damn brave and aggressive.
The blame lays squarely with Sisolak a big bad-ass bully wannabe politician. The recall efforts against him continue, but it is unlikely any will succeed.
Issuing executive orders for laws without penalties like the state or federal legislators would do is akin to giving nuts to a squirrel with no teeth.
I project the Vegas Valley will be in a full-blown depression within two years. Many of the kingpin casinos will collapse and be sold for pennies on the dollar. The day of the casino group and the mega resort will be over. The heyday of Vegas Valley long gone by.
Many area businesses will follow suit, including the big time publishers.
Tens of thousands of people will be out of work.
Greenspun will be a has-been media group. And so will many others. When the advertising source dies, so will the publications that were sustained by them.
People will flee from Vegas in busloads and truckloads. Moving vans will be seen in convoys stretching across America’s highways and expressways.
Market-values of property will decline. The stock market will dive
Hope and change will turn to despair and discouragement. Regrets, too.
Banks will close.
Suicide, divorce, bankruptcy, domestic violence and crime will be at an all-time high.
Crime will escalate to levels far beyond the 2010 level when Las Vegas neighborhoods took #3, #4 and #8 most dangerous neighborhoods in America according to the FBI.
Las Vegas used to be a place where cheating got you taken to a back room and your knees broken. Now, the left seems to not only condone cheating, but embraces it.
It will all come back around, sooner or later. Karma. Wait for it!
You played it, you own it.
MGM Resorts is closing a lot of properties or thinking about it. Properties are for sale. Sands, is up for sale. Wynn is down 80% from last year. Losing money at that rate, even the best of the properties cannot sustain for long. Tropicana laid off dozens of workers. Many casinos that were closed because of Sisolak’s executive orders, then reopened, are closing again. Many venues inside those casinos that are open are closed.
Several new properties recently opened after large construction. New properties opening while older, well-established properties are closing is ironic even for a seasoned investor to grasp. It remains to be seen how they will fair. People will come to see the new properties, but will they come back again to sustain them?
The way I see it, the big-time, long-time boys that made Vegas what it is today are cashing in and getting on a jet plane for the fastest way out of town. That ought to be a tell even a blind man could read.
Flip a coin, toss the dice. Do whatever you want to do, but whatever you do, don’t blame Trump because he had nothing to do with what’s coming for the future here in the Vegas Valley.
You reap what you sow and you live with it.
Look both ways crossing the streets, even if it is a one-way.
Even if you don’t like country music, you probably loved Kenny Rogers. He sang so many songs that sent messages to any human being that had a heartbeat.
He was beyond being a crossover. Way beyond.
In his prime, he was the Universal man.
One of the first songs I ever remember hearing Kenny Rogers sing was with the band Kenny Rogers and the First Edition, Ruby Don’t Take Your Love to Town.
I had a crush on that gorgeous female singer who played the tambourine in those sexy white boots and miniskirt.
I think I was sixteen, maybe fifteen. Or seventeen. I can’t remember.
It was during the Vietnam war. I had friends that went and never came back home.
Kenny Rogers manned up to that crazy Asian war.
That was a looong time ago. Ages.
A half a century ago.
But the pain and suffering and the memories of the loss still survive in the mind. Vividly.
Kenny Rogers sang a lot of great songs, most of them having real meaning of life. But the two I cherish the most are the first one I heard Ruby, and the later one, the Gambler. There was a third, if I must pick the best of Kenny Rogers and that was, The Coward of the County.
All of his songs were great. I believe all of them were hits.
Dolly Parton whom I was kissed by in the 70s at the Proctor’s Theater in Schenectady, New York, said Kenny Rogers was a great man and a gentleman. She loved working with him. She wasn’t so fond of saying the same of the other men she performed with over the years.
I trust Dolly Parton’s judgement of character.
I miss the First Edition which I had 8-track tapes of and played in the tape decks of the muscle cars I used to drive back in the day.
One of my best friends who I worked with while still in high-school was killed in a high-speed crash that those songs bring back the memory of, good or bad.
I live in Vegas now, nearly 3,000 miles from my home town where I grew up. The Gambler is part of life. But the song, tells a message most people miss.
Most of Kenny Roger’s songs told a story, sort of a ballad, and they all had meaning to life.
Did you listen to those words of wisdom that one of the greatest American singers sung when he performed live or in studio?
Every song Kenny Roger ever sang was a hit. Every song was a story of life. Real life. Life lived by the way real people lived life and died from it.
BBC News Feeds do not open in a New Window. News Feeds open in the same Window, so be sure to back button when finished reading news articles. To open in a new tab or window, follow these instructions: Hover your cursor over the title link. Highlight the headline title link. Right click to OPEN LINK IN NEW TAB (Preferred). (Or open link in new window.)Then just close window when finished reading news story.
Vegas Valley 
Too Big to Survive
Posted: 06/11/2020 | Author: Cliff Harrison | Filed under: Business, Clark County, Commentary, Las Vegas, News | Tags: Casinos, Vegas Series, Vegas Stories, Vegas Valley, Writer, Writing | Leave a commentLas Vegas Casinos in Intensive Care on Life Support
The leftist-supporting casino executives may have shot themselves, not in the foot, but in the head. Brian Greenspun, the leader of leftist media in Las Vegas has spun out multiples of anti-Trump publications and he singly may have doomed the town with his leftist Marxist rhetoric.
Of course, the communist-like Governor Steve Sisolak, a longtime Clark County Commissioner who failed to curb the escalation of human trafficking, marketing of illegal escort services, fronts for prostitution, growth of illegal invaders populating the town and multiple other criminal activities in the Vegas Valley is allied with Brian Greenspun, kingsh*t CEO, Publisher and Editor of Greenspun Media Group.
Between the two, it is safe to say, Las Vegas will fall not to a recession, but a full-blown depression unlike any it has ever seen in its history.
Jokers with a pair of dice in their hands.
But people will not only keep doing business with these two jokers in the stacked deck, they will also keep supporting them until the dealing is done and there isn’t any more options left for a town that will soon be dying.
Some of the most well-known, notorious casino magnates, top executives and years-long leading managers, CEOs and chairmen have already bailed out, or have been pushed out and moved on reaping multi-million-dollar severance pays.
Steve Wynn, one of the most brilliant minds in developing the modern-day Vegas was removed from his throne over scandals. Rather the allegations against Wynn were true or not doesn’t matter, it was never a trial in a court of law, it was a trial in the media and by the powers that be. Whatever. The community lost one of the greatest masterminds in Vegas maneuverability. A resort genius who developed some of prime, most profitable properties in the Vegas Valley.
Sheldon Adelson, Sands Resort tycoon says the casino group is up for sale, eyeing a six billion dollar price tag for the Venetian and Palazzo. Adelson, a Trump supporter, and the family head of the most recent owners of the Las Vegas Review Journal maybe bailing out while the bailing is good.
Many other Vegas Valley properties not mentioned in this post are downsizing, slowing down, limiting operations, laying off, closing or changing hands, too. That’s a big tell even a bad gambler can read.
The Review Journal, by the way, ironically, delivers the Greenspun group’s Las Vegas Sun print newspaper.
Jim Murren, longtime MGM’s top executive stepped down earlier this year.
He recently put his mansion on the market for 10.5 million dollars. Murren is another anti-Trump voicepiece who just a few days ago penned a “Vote for Biden” piece in the Greenspun Las Vegas Sun with an introduction by Brian Greenspun: Murren’s Column in the Las Vegas Sun
With Murren, Wynn and Adelson gone and many other longtime casino barons, recently gone from the Vegas scene, Vegas is in the hands of amateurs and the inexperience. It’s anyone’s guess where the numbers land from here on in. Like a pair of dice tossed across a crap table, the house can call, “Seven out, line away,” or “Pay the don’ts.”
When a few years ago, Vegas shifted from safe, paid-off multi-million-dollar casinos with little or no debt to heavily mortgaged, mega resorts financed with heavy-debt, multi-billion-dollar casinos the stakes increased. The risks magnified.
The house went all in with a pair of duces against the hand of nature’s economics sequental royal flush.
In the heyday of Vegas there was no such thing as a day dark or when a casino was shut down and none were operating. The only time I recall in Vegas Valley history, except for recently, where the casinos on the Strip turned out the lights and went dark was when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated on 22 November 1963.
Then there were lights out for Earth Day, but the casinos were open and operating, nevertheless.
Despite some record-breaking visitor totals in recent months, Las Vegas Strip casinos are not only hurting, but they are also on life support. The blame? Covid 19 Virus.
But there is more to it than Covid 19, much more.
The left has set the mood for massive violence in the country and the Las Vegas Strip has not been immune. The Strip has seen an escalation in crime and violence that has hit right in the heart of the Vegas Valley cash cow.
Visitors and tourists are not going to risk their lives or their families in a town where what happens here, doesn’t stay here any more. Violence drives any conscious human being away to safer destinations.
Greenspun is a lefty anti-Trump mouthpiece that just last week published the Las Vegas Weekly with a cover, that mocks President Trump and yields huge headlines, END THIS CHAOS. Vote.
This week’s edition talks about a divided nation and blames President Trump.
The division of this nation began with Obama and Joe Biden before Trump ever took office and continued every second by the forces of the left until this very moment.
Publications like Greenspun and his media group’s are the epitome of chaos.
Chaos has spilled over in multiple Las Vegas casinos recently, downtown and on the Strip.
Not only fist fights, gang brawls, but gun play and knives being involved, too. It will get worst. Much worst.
The Wynn property was a recent victim of violence and so were several Strip properties, like Paris.
The leftist politicians, across the nation, have repeatedly called for violence against Trump supporters and right-wing Americans with no limitation on that violence.
I am not going to discuss the BLM and Antifa violence that has raged across America, fully with left-wing support and endorsement, you all know where that leads. You all know what it is all about. It is perfectly okay to riot, to burn down innocent people’s businesses and to injure and kill people. To destroy public and private property. To disobey police orders, to resist, to revolt, to…. create chaos.
The chaos Brian Greenspun’s lefty rags blame on Trump was started by the leftwing comrades long before Trump came on the scene.
Obama, Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton and many other leftwing politicians led the movement of that chaos.
The Vegas Valley felt the crushing blows of that chaos in the Obama-Biden Great Recession that were blamed on Bush.
You reap what you sow. You get what you ask for.
And yet, they call Trump the divider, the hater.
But what are you going to do when it lands back on your own lap and your own business gets burned down? Cry for the police you so wantonly condemned and wanted to defund?
Sisolak Big Shot governor now, issues multiple executive orders, and not only closed down businesses directly causing many of them to fold, issued social distances, mandatory wearing personal protection equipment but failing to provide any legal penalties for people who fail to comply. “Resistors.”
All the time people are invading my safe space, and yet short of shooting them in the head to get them to comply they stand there aggressively telling me to go F myself.
Sisolak failed to provide mandatory felony prison sentences for those big tough guys that like to bully elders who wouldn’t give one damn putting them in a body bag should they get too damn brave and aggressive.
The blame lays squarely with Sisolak a big bad-ass bully wannabe politician. The recall efforts against him continue, but it is unlikely any will succeed.
Issuing executive orders for laws without penalties like the state or federal legislators would do is akin to giving nuts to a squirrel with no teeth.
I project the Vegas Valley will be in a full-blown depression within two years. Many of the kingpin casinos will collapse and be sold for pennies on the dollar. The day of the casino group and the mega resort will be over. The heyday of Vegas Valley long gone by.
Many area businesses will follow suit, including the big time publishers.
Tens of thousands of people will be out of work.
Greenspun will be a has-been media group. And so will many others. When the advertising source dies, so will the publications that were sustained by them.
People will flee from Vegas in busloads and truckloads. Moving vans will be seen in convoys stretching across America’s highways and expressways.
Market-values of property will decline. The stock market will dive
Hope and change will turn to despair and discouragement. Regrets, too.
Banks will close.
Suicide, divorce, bankruptcy, domestic violence and crime will be at an all-time high.
Crime will escalate to levels far beyond the 2010 level when Las Vegas neighborhoods took #3, #4 and #8 most dangerous neighborhoods in America according to the FBI.
Las Vegas used to be a place where cheating got you taken to a back room and your knees broken. Now, the left seems to not only condone cheating, but embraces it.
It will all come back around, sooner or later. Karma. Wait for it!
You played it, you own it.
MGM Resorts is closing a lot of properties or thinking about it. Properties are for sale. Sands, is up for sale. Wynn is down 80% from last year. Losing money at that rate, even the best of the properties cannot sustain for long. Tropicana laid off dozens of workers. Many casinos that were closed because of Sisolak’s executive orders, then reopened, are closing again. Many venues inside those casinos that are open are closed.
Several new properties recently opened after large construction. New properties opening while older, well-established properties are closing is ironic even for a seasoned investor to grasp. It remains to be seen how they will fair. People will come to see the new properties, but will they come back again to sustain them?
The way I see it, the big-time, long-time boys that made Vegas what it is today are cashing in and getting on a jet plane for the fastest way out of town. That ought to be a tell even a blind man could read.
Flip a coin, toss the dice. Do whatever you want to do, but whatever you do, don’t blame Trump because he had nothing to do with what’s coming for the future here in the Vegas Valley.
You reap what you sow and you live with it.
Look both ways crossing the streets, even if it is a one-way.
Until next time. ~Cliff