Elaine Wynn, a philanthropic giant, education champion and leading woman among Nevada casino executives, has died. She was 82 years old.
The Elaine P. Wynn & Family Foundation announced her death Tuesday. Punam Mathur, the foundation’s executive director, said Wynn died peacefully after a short illness Monday morning at her residence in Los Angeles, surrounded by loved ones.
Wynn Resorts Ltd. issued the following statement on her passing:
“We are all deeply saddened to hear of the passing of Elaine Wynn and send our condolences to her daughters, grandchildren, and her many close friends. As co-founder and one of the largest shareholders of Wynn Resorts, she helped to create and grow the company to become the most esteemed luxury resort brand in the world. Her many talents and special touches are indelibly imprinted on the company and still evident throughout our resorts.
“Elaine cared deeply about the employees of our resorts. The current and former employees who worked alongside her to create Wynn and Encore Las Vegas cherish the many fond memories they have of her, especially of when they opened Wynn Las Vegas with her 20 years ago this month.
“She was a tireless advocate for Las Vegas, for children and their education, and for the arts. We’re grateful that the enduring sense of philanthropy she instilled in our company continues to this day.”
Elaine Wynn’s rise to power and wealth paralleled that of her former husband, Steve Wynn. They were married twice and divorced for the second time in 2010.
She was born Elaine Pascal on April 28, 1942, in New York City, and grew up partly in Miami Beach, where her mother was a homemaker and her father sold package tours for resort hotels. She majored in political science at George Washington University, graduating in 1964.
She met Steve Wynn on a blind date arranged by relatives. They were married in 1963, at the end of her junior year. Steve Wynn had just graduated from the University of Pennsylvania. He took over and revitalized the family business, a Maryland bingo parlor, which had been foundering because of the untimely illness and death of his father.
Related: Tributes to Las Vegas philanthropist Elaine Wynn
Then an opportunity came to invest in the Frontier Hotel in Las Vegas.
“We decided if we were going to be in the gaming-entertainment-amusement business, why not go to where it really exists in a much greater capacity,” Elaine told author Jack Sheehan for a biography he wrote about the Wynns’ mentor, banker E. Parry Thomas. “We hired a manager for the bingo business, and we used the proceeds from some of the good fortune we had at the bingo (parlor) as an investment — as our initial investment — in the Frontier.”
The Wynns moved to Las Vegas in 1967. She told Sheehan: “Initially I did feel very out of place because I still was in most respects a very traditional middle-class Jewish girl … and life here seemed pretty fast. But I had grown up in Miami Beach, and it was a similar environment to Las Vegas minus the gaming. A lot of the same people wound up in Las Vegas.”
Soon she was involved in civic activity and would remain so all her life.
She became involved in business also. With her husband, Elaine Wynn was a co-founder of both Mirage Resorts in 1976 and Wynn Resorts Ltd. in 2000. Both were of extraordinary importance in the gaming industry. Swimming upstream against conventional wisdom, which said the town was overbuilt, The Mirage added another 3,000 rooms, and ushered in the era of megaresorts, which soon had costs in the billions. Wynn Resorts’ first property, the Wynn Las Vegas, was at the time the most expensive resort ever built, at $2.7 billion, yet soon proved the most profitable in Las Vegas, and the company was an initial concessionaire in gaming in the former Portuguese special administrative region of Macao, now owned by China.
Elaine Wynn attended the July 17 closing of The Mirage, which is now being transformed into the Hard Rock casino-hotel.
‘Separate and apart from Steve’
Steve Wynn was famously mentored by banker Thomas, but it is less well-known Thomas did something similar for Steve’s young spouse. She told Thomas’ biographer, “Parry was the first person who I respected and admired who made me believe that I had worth separate and apart from Steve, and that my influence on Steve … was very important and very critical to his success.”
The Wynns’ divorces were said to be amicable, but after the second one, Elaine sued Steve Wynn in 2012 to break an agreement which gave Steve voting control of her stock in Wynn Resorts. The arrangement gave Steve Wynn control of the company even though he was personally only the second-largest shareholder, behind T. Rowe Price & Associates. Elaine Wynn at the time was the third-largest.
In April 2015, the directors of Wynn Resorts refused to re-elect Elaine Wynn to the company board.
When Steve Wynn was accused of sexual harassment and stepped down as an officer and CEO of Wynn Resorts in 2018, he agreed to return control of Elaine Wynn’s shares to her.
In 2019, Elaine Wynn testified before the Massachusetts Gaming Commission, which was considering revoking the company’s license prior to the opening of Encore Boston Harbor. Her testimony, in addition to that of Chairman Phil Satre, CEO Matt Maddox and other board members, convinced those regulators to allow the property to open later in June. She attended the grand opening.
Focus on philanthropic activities
In 2020, Elaine Wynn was relicensed by Nevada gaming regulators as an investor and told them that she no longer desired to join the Wynn board and was ineligible due to a company-set age restriction. At that time, she said she wanted to spend more time with her philanthropic activities.
Forbes estimated her net worth at $1.7 billion in September 2020. At the time of her death, Forbes estimated her net worth at $1.9 billion.
The charity positions on Elaine Wynn’s résumé were almost as impressive as the business ones. In 1983, she was chairwoman of the dedication event of the 18,000-seat Thomas & Mack Center at UNLV, a high-class party that included performances by Frank Sinatra, Diana Ross and Dean Martin, and served notice to the nation that Las Vegas had pretty much recovered from the slow times of the past several years. The event also marked the presentation to star basketball coach Jerry Tarkanian of a magnificent home court that is still informally called “The Shark Tank.”
Related: In final message, Elaine Wynn recalled ‘pressure-packed’ resort opening
Elaine Wynn became chairwoman of the UNLV Foundation, the university’s fund-raising arm, in 1985. And although she was herself a rabid basketball fan, she was aligned with then-president Robert Maxson in his efforts to make UNLV an academic leader, rather than an apparent afterthought to its famous basketball team. Although the foundation had become closely identified with the athletic program, she coaxed millions from social and business leaders to bolster academics, research and building.
“We need to put balance back in the picture,” she told The Associated Press in 1991. “Basketball, as much fun as it is … is really meant to be a small part of the university.”
Wynn resigned as chairwoman after 1991 but remained a supporter of UNLV. Maxson’s methods were not universally popular, and he left the school in 1994.
In 1993, Wynn’s daughter Kevyn, then 26, was kidnapped but released unharmed after Steve Wynn paid a $1.45 million ransom. The kidnappers were caught and served prison terms.
In 2011, she was appointed to co-chair Nevada’s Blue Ribbon Education Reform Task Force, which resulted in the enactment of ambitious new reform legislation. In 2013 and again in 2015, Gov. Brian Sandoval appointed her to two-year terms on the Nevada State Board of Education, where she was elected president. She was co-chair of the Greater Las Vegas After-School All-Stars, which serves low-income youth.
Communities in Schools
But her most important charity work, she said in December 2015, was for Communities in Schools, which claims to be “the nation’s largest and most effective organization dedicated to keeping kids in school and helping them succeed in life.” The organization provides a structured means of bringing social services, such as health care and counseling, to at-risk students so they can concentrate on learning and teachers can concentrate on teaching them. She was national chair of the organization at the time of the interview and had served as state chairwoman.
An elementary school in Clark County is named for her.
In 2015, she was also state co-chair, with former Las Vegas Mayor Jan Jones Blackhurst, of Everytown USA, a group pushing a referendum for universal background checks for firearm purchases. At that time she was considering getting involved in that group’s efforts at a national level.
Her direct involvements in politics, she said, were “no more than the average person’s. I believe in making financial contributions in modest amounts. But I am not comfortable making big contributions, because I believe America is a democracy.”
Elaine Wynn was known as a patron of the arts, most famously for her 2013 purchase of Francis Bacon’s “Three Studies of Lucian Freud” for $141.4 million. She lent the work to the Portland Art Museum. She was co-chair of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. In 2011, she established the Elaine Wynn Studio for Arts Education at The Smith Center for the Performing Arts in Las Vegas. That same year, President Barack Obama appointed her to the board of trustees of the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.
Elaine Wynn was a champion of Las Vegas’ forthcoming art museum. The long-awarded project is set to take over a 1.5-acre parcel in Symphony Park, just east of The Smith Center’s Reynolds Hall (home of Nevada Ballet Theatre and Las Vegas Philharmonic performances) and Discovery Children’s Museum. Construction could start as early as 2026.
Wynn called the museum a passion project.
“For me, this is a personal legacy of giving something back to my city,” she said in a September interview with the Review-Journal. “This museum is to be enjoyed primarily by people who live and work here, and the children who go to school here, and hopefully the visitors who come to Las Vegas.”
Elaine Wynn is survived by two daughters, Kevyn and Gillian Wynn, who live in Southern California and are themselves deeply involved in charity work, and seven grandchildren.
