Craig Billings’ biggest wager as chief executive officer of Wynn Resorts Ltd. is starting to pay off.
For three years, the executive has been on a quest to build a casino from scratch on a desolate stretch of desert in the United Arab Emirates. Under Billings, the hospitality giant has already sunk more than half a billion dollars into the tower even though gambling remains illegal in the country and government officials go to great length to avoid uttering the word “casino.”
Against those odds, the firm last week received the UAE’s first-ever commercial gaming operator’s license.
It was back in 2022 that the tiny emirate of Ras Al Khaimah gave Wynn the green light to begin work on the project on the Marjan islands, a tiny 2.7 square-kilometer stretch of manmade archipelago that’s been largely unused for the last decade. Work began on the tower almost immediately and it’s already grown to become the tallest building in the emirate.
To an outsider, Billings’ moves probably seem crazy.
But Billings, to his credit, is no outsider. A Las Vegas native, he cut his teeth as an investment banker at Goldman Sachs Group Inc., advising some of the biggest gaming companies on the planet before going on to become an executive at the slot machine maker Aristocrat Leisure. He joined Wynn in 2017 and helped shepherd the company through the worst of the pandemic.
And after two decades in the business, Billings thinks he knows a good bet when he sees one.
“The UAE is the most exciting new market for our industry in decades,” Billings gushed to investors in August after spending several weeks in Dubai and Ras Al Khaimah. “In terms of relative returns, I think the highest relative return that we can quantify now is absolutely in the UAE on Al Marjan Island.”
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