After a deal is done, there’s generally a celebratory dinner on both sides.
No matter what’s gone down, these meals are more fun when you’re the buyer. When you sell, even if you’ve gotten the best of it financially, there’s often a sense of melancholy that comes with the close of an adventure. When you buy, even if you’ve overpaid, you’re lifting a glass to opportunity and toasting the possibilities of your future.
So who got the best of it?
Well, there are a lot of ways to look at it.
In a single year at The Nugget, Tim and I made a profit of $113 million. That’s 226 percent on the $50 million we invested. That’s more money than anyone in downtown Las Vegas has ever made faster than anyone has ever made it. In fact, it’s been called the highest rate of return in such a short time span ever in the gaming industry.
I’ve always believed that the best deals are the ones where everybody feels like they walk away a winner.
Maybe Tilman Fertitta sits in his office at this very moment and thinks he got the best of it. The day it was announced, the deal drove up the price of Landry’s shares more than 12 percent on the New York Stock Exchange. Since then, Tilman has spent $125 million renovating The Nugget. Though as I tell this story, the downtown market is in its ninth consecutive negative growth month, The Nugget’s revenues are flat, and Landry’s stock is at the same level it was before the deal was announced. Still, there’s a huge factor that could well be in Tilman’s favor. The valuations of property in Las Vegas have soared since we signed the deal on the week of the Super Bowl in 2005. They’ve soared to the point where Tim often says, “I don’t think God could’ve seen what’s happened to Las Vegas.”
One month, we blink in disbelief when we hear that the asking price for Strip property where the Frontier sits is $36 million an acre. The next month, we’re even more astonished to find out that it’s been sold at that price. There’s so much money floating around Wall Street and so many people with the green felt disease that these days anything less than a billion won’t get you much on The Strip. If people start to look downtown as an alternative, Tilman Fertitta will be in the best possible place.
But that’s just the dollars and cents of it.
As my best buddy likes to say, “You can only eat one steak at a meal.” (Although he’s been known to order two while seated across from a preachy vegetarian.) Tim was a much wiser man the second time around. He didn’t go into a funk after he’d sold his dream. He now races twenty feet from his bedroom to the computers in his office every morning to bet on the stock market. He never said “I told you so” when he heard that Mr. Royalty lost the $8 million he’d taken from us along with just about everything else that he’d won on his streak. And he’s constantly on the lookout for our next big business venture.
While waiting for our next move, I’ve gotten to mentor a great group of kids at the Agassi College Preparatory Academy and develop a program that assists budding entrepreneurs at the University of San Diego. I also met the love of my life. On the evening I first set eyes upon Vanessa Tarazona, her friends asked us to pose for a photo together and kept on saying, “Closer…closer…closer…” It never stops amazing me how we continue to grow closer by the minute. I knew it was right because my best friend told me so. So did Vanessa, when she asked that her groom and his best man be dressed in the same style of tuxedo.
Now I finish telling a story that allows me to see what my best friend and I have accomplished since we shook hands on a frozen lake.
It’s kind of funny. All through the crazy negotiations with Tilman, I kept saying to Tim, “I’ll believe it when I see his name in ink on paper.”
But that’s not the image that I took from the contract.
My most enduring memory of the contract remains the moment when I wrote my name in ink on the page. I did so with a gift Tim gave me just prior: a unique fountain pen.
It’s called the Amerigo Vespucci pen, in honor of the Italian explorer for whom our country is named, and it’s custom-made of sterling silver and mother of pearl. It came in a beautiful wooden box etched with a picture of a ship sailing with the wind at its back. I’m telling you, I was almost scared to pick this pen up. It was a huge leap from my Bic.
When I took it in my hands, I felt like John Hancock or Thomas Jefferson about to sign the Declaration of Independence. That’s how I signed the contract.
I put the pen back in its leather enclosure, shut the box, and stared at the image of that ship. And I felt that we hadn’t really just sold The Golden Nugget. Tim and I had just signed on to explore somewhere new.