Stephen A. Wynn
Management
Well, there you go, Steve, you ought to come to the board meeting. Here was the idea, here is the idea out of my little brain. Las Vegas, we are the prettiest girl on the block and nobody argues with that, and we're going to remain the premier hotel on the strip. There are wonderful hotels on the strip, but we are the five star puppy and we are the ones with the record-breaking casino win and we have the bulk of the -- more than our share of the top discretionary business from international and domestic play. But Las Vegas needs support domestically, the amount of gaming activity in Las Vegas domestically has less than it was 5 years ago. The non-gaming revenue in Las Vegas at our place, because we're very big in that area, night clubs and all that sort of thing, restaurants, everybody is a foodie these days. Non-casino revenue has gone up. But casino revenue, domestically, is not a growing business. It's because of the spread of gaming to the regional casinos. The regional casinos on the other hand, and we can use Caesars as an example, the folks at Harrah's bought Caesars because they needed a home base to offer as a reward, to help promote their regional casinos. The regional casinos on the other hand help support Caesars in a very nice way by sending the best of their customers with slot jackpots and promotional rewards to Caesars Palace. This is such an important thing that the folks at Pinnacle Gaming made a deal with Wynn to use us as a base for their players, and we get some nice players from Pinnacle and Pinnacle benefits from that. It was a deal that Dr. Maddox made. Now we said we weren't into riverboats and racinos, not our thing. So we've always eschewed any opportunity like that. But all of a sudden, Pennsylvania and Massachusetts say we're going to put hotel casinos in the metropolitan area. Now this means that the era of the grand hotel could come back again, beautiful hotels that people actually go and stay for the weekend, eat in fine restaurants, have meetings. And sure, if they want to gamble, they go down the hall and gamble in a room that's isolated. I like that idea, the grand hotel, I love the old -- the heyday of the Waldorf Astoria and the Ritz and the places like that. So I thought, well, here comes the chance to resurrect the grand hotel in Boston and Philadelphia, and we'll bring our brand to those cities and bring people from outside the region into the region. That will also help us increase our databases in Las Vegas. And Las Vegas, on the other hand, because we're a premier property, will make the people that go to Boston or Philadelphia even more excited about being part of the Wynn system. So I saw this pretty picture of Urban Wynn in Boston and Philadelphia hotels of our standard, at our level, complementing our place in Las Vegas, and maybe us picking up $15 million or $20 million in EBITDA here as incremental profitability in Las Vegas. And incidentally, in the process, establishing a structure in Philadelphia or Boston that would be so exemplary, such a case study in what we do, so completely different from the relatively ugly face of gaming in America. I think if you look at regional gaming in America, with 1 or 2 exceptions, it's homely -- racinos are homely and unattractive places. But we were going to build something that would be a case study on what's really nice and pretty in town. And then if they had gambling in Dallas or Houston or in Chicago, they would come to us. We would have an example just like Wynn, and -- listen, we got Macau because of Bellagio and Mirage. It was our track record, it was the things that we actually did not what we said that have made us the company we are. Actions speak louder than words than especially developers-speak. So that was my idea about the Urban Wynn. And then you ran smack dab into these freshman regulatory agencies and their unbelievable pre-occupation that maybe a gangster is going to get in or that. I had one investigator, I won't mention any details, that asked one of my outside directors for proof of the ownership of his car. For crying out loud, how ridiculous. And we had to pay for this crap by the hour. And another person wanted to ask a 56-year married person on my board, a person of extraordinary character and reputation, for proof of his marriage license. Well, deal fatigue sets in at this point and we say Urban Wynn is such a fetching idea and makes sense on the domestic side of Wynn Las Vegas. See, we take Wynn Las Vegas as a company that's under-leveraged with $3 billion of equity in it, and we say we could change the name of Wynn Las Vegas to Wynn America and build Boston and Philadelphia as part of Wynn Las Vegas, of Wynn America and have a new domestic company called Wynn America and that would be a model for us to go to other cities and grow in the future, not as a regional casino but as metropolitan hotel casinos in cities as I've mentioned before. So Steve, that was the idea that got us into this. And sometimes, when you're faced with an alligator and you're up to your neck in them, you say I came here to drain the swamp. What happened? So we're trying to figure things out, but that was the thinking that was behind it. At the same time, our opportunities in Asia expand rapidly and beautifully, and we're well-received there, we love being there. And for all intents and purposes, Asia is going to grow in South Korea, Japan. And our hotel in Cotai is going to be so preemptive, the Wynn Palace, it’s called. Wynn Palace in Cotai is going to be the most photographed casino structure in the world when it comes into focus in a few months. And I think that's going to serve as an example of what we do when we put our best game forward. So these are all things we're trying to sort out, maybe that's more information than you wanted. But that was my thinking as we went forward with Urban Wynn, and it is my thinking at the moment barring any changes.