Dropout to Billionaire--LA's 'Richest Man' Kirk Kerkorian Dies

Billionaire financier Kirk Kerkorian, one of the founders of modern Las Vegas, has died in Beverly Hills after a brief illness, associates said today. He was 98.

Kerkorian was the largest shareholder in MGM Resorts International, which he founded in the early 1990s, according to the Las Vegas Review-Journal, the first to report his death, which occurred Monday night.

“MGM Resorts and our family of 62,000 employees are honoring the memory of a great man, a great business leader, a great community leader, an innovator, and one of our country’s greatest generation,” MGM Resorts International Chairman and CEO Jim Murren said in a statement reported by the Las Vegas Review-Journal. Anthony Mandekic, the president and CEO of Kerkorian’s company Tracinda Corp., told the Los Angeles Times that Kerkorian died Monday evening at his home in Beverly Hills, one of his abodes.

“He was the most brilliant person I’ve ever run across, and so respectful of everyone,” Mandekic told The Times this morning. “He gave everything he could, right to the end.

“We have lost such a great icon. He was truly something special.”

Three times in his career, Kerkorian built and opened what were considered the world’s largest hotel-casinos -- the International, now the Westgate Las Vegas, in 1969; the original MGM Grand, now Bally’s Las Vegas, in 1973; and the current MGM Grand Las Vegas in 1993.

He invested in numerous industries, including airlines, carmakers and film studios. In the 1940s, he operated a small airline that shuttled gamblers into then-remote Las Vegas from a Los Angeles-area airport.

No business held his interest as much as gaming, according to the Review- Journal. Kerkorian owned, operated and sold a handful of historic Strip resorts, playing a paramount role in shaping the landscape of the Strip and Las Vegas.

Publications and historians called Kerkorian one of the central figures in helping Las Vegas grow into one of the world’s premier tourist destinations. He was an eighth-grade dropout who traded his way to a $15 billion fortune and for a time became the richest person in Los Angeles, according to The Times.

City News Service

Photo: Kirk Kerkorian by flickr