The Education of Millionaires - Michael Ellsberg [93]
“In 2007, El-Ad out of New York offered me $1.2 billion, which is the highest per-square-foot offer ever in Vegas. So from nothing, to a billion. That’s how it happened. When they wired that money into my bank, Bank of America, I don’t think they’d ever seen that kind of a wire into a private account before.”
For a while, Ruffin just watched his billion-plus in cash sit there and grow. In a problem many people—including most college graduates—would like to have, he got bored of this. “Frankly, we didn’t know what the hell to do with the money. I’d never been a big buyer of stocks. I don’t like to invest in other guys’ businesses. You know what they do—they have big bonuses, they have all kinds of stock options for themselves. We sat on that money for a while. I didn’t like just sitting on money. That kind of money will make you very good money. Eighty-nine million a year, we did. But I didn’t like the business. I didn’t even care about going to work. I just sat there and watched the screen, watched the money come in.”
Ruffin soon found himself back in the action. “A friend of mine said he thought MGM might be having some cash problems and might want to sell a property. I had always looked at Treasure Island. Once I heard it was for sale, I got a meeting with Kirk Kerkorian,” Ruffin told me.
(Kerkorian is another famous Las Vegas casino magnate billionaire. Kerkorian dropped out of eighth grade, became an amateur boxer, then got a pilot’s license. At the outbreak of World War II, he started flying combat aircraft across the Atlantic for delivery to the British Royal Air Force. This was extremely risky, because the aircraft barely had enough fuel capacity to fly these long flights. He later went into the airline business, and then the hotel business, becoming a multibillionaire.)
“He said he was at $850 million,” Ruffin told me. “Of course, I was sitting on that cash. I said, ‘Well, I’m at $700 million.’ He said no. I said, ‘Let’s split the difference, 750.’ He said, ‘That’s not splitting the difference, 775 is!’ We ended up shaking hands at 750.”
I paid for my few nights in Ruffin’s lovely Treasure Island Hotel and Casino (http://www.treasureisland.com), when I flew into town to interview him, to see the fruits of his labor firsthand. Ruffin, who once worked repossessing monkeys as a college dropout, now owns the sprawling hotel and entertainment complex. A few weeks before I arrived there, another non–college graduate billionaire, Guy Laliberté, was there, celebrating the record-breaking eight thousandth performance of Mystère, the first Vegas production put on by Laliberté’s Cirque du Soleil; the show is on permanent residence at Treasure Island.
Ruffin enjoys a long-standing spot on the Forbes 400, with a net worth of several billion. He is happily married to former Miss Ukraine, model Oleksandra Nikolayenko-Ruffin, with whom he has a son. In his office behind the casino, I asked him what words of advice he has for young people seeking success in life.
“The advice I would give to young people? Quit your job. Don’t work for anybody. You really can’t make any money working for someone else. Maybe it’s a hamburger stand. Maybe it’s a coffee shop. You can do that. It’s very risky to quit your job and start on your own. You have to be committed to it and you have to be willing to work the hours, because you can’t have a lot of labor. You can start almost any kind of business yourself. It doesn’t take a lot of capital. It’s very doable. You have to work your ass off. Be willing to work yourself.”
I think Ruffin’s advice applies, even for those who are not ready to start their own business or who wish to stay with a career as an employee. These days,