Steve Wynn Quotes

100 Steve Wynn Quotes

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[On his father being a charming man] But a compulsive gambler.
Steve Wynn

It’s an irony. It’s accidental. But it is an irony. But my father had a terrible problem with gambling. He was a guy that enjoyed that activity so much that he lost control of it.
Steve Wynn

I would give anything half hour, fifteen minutes with my father to walk him through anything that good fortune has allowed to come my way these past forty years.
Steve Wynn

[On his father changing his name to Wynn ] He changed his name. When he was a kid he was Weinberg.
Steve Wynn

[On views that he transformed the Las Vegas strip on entertainment bringing acts for the first time such as Cirque du Soleil] I’ve been given too much credit for that really. If you look at Las Vegas in the 1980’s there hadn’t been anything built since 1973 new. So the city was in a time warp. As is so often the case, in the valley of the blind, the one eye’d man is king. All of a sudden I looked like I was a rocket scientist.
Steve Wynn

I wish that I was a more considerate person and to the extent that I demonstrate consideration for other people at my age. I wish that I had gotten to that point earlier.
Steve Wynn

[On meeting with the Dalai Llama] He says to me ‘When you get angry, when you lose your temper, when you think that you shout and react in a poor way to other people it is a result of a false sense of yourself. An inflated sense of yourself. That is worthless.’
Steve Wynn

[On his single vision] To see if I could do, to see if I could make people go ‘Wow!’. To see if I could create a place that it was a wonderland. A place that was better than the outside world… Where everything inside was beautiful.
Steve Wynn

You can spend as much money as you want on fancy carpets, and fabrics and marble floors. Hopefully if you’re got good taste you build a pretty place, but the truth of the building, it’s long term viability as a business, is about the people that work there. And culture and the feeling they have about the enterprise and each other.
Steve Wynn

[On building a new casino] It takes about four or five years to design and build one of these. A couple of years of design, three years to build give or take a month or two. This five year turn the most critical thing is who’s working here.
Steve Wynn



[On opening Encore in 2009] In terms of maximizing revenues, we’re in a trough not a peak. So what? Cycles, we’re had them before, we’ll have them again. We’re here to run a business up or down and create a good experience for he public. And to do it with a happy workforce.
Steve Wynn

I don’t want to minimize the impact of economic business cycles, on Las Vegas… But if you’re a business executive and a manager like myself and my colleagues are, that’s not really our issue. Our issue is to run the business to lead the staff in good times or bad. That’s what we get paid for. To a certain extent you can look upon these kinds of economic cycles as exercises. You’ve got to be able to do it up or down, in the bright sunshine or a little in the shade. You’ve got to be able to do this.
Steve Wynn

The skills that we’ve developed and our ambitions, are irrelevant to the economic conditions outside we have to react perhaps, we’ll try when it’s really booming, we’ll enjoy higher levels of revenue… Maybe we are a little freer with the payroll compared to when times are tight. But basically I don’t really care about short-term business cycles.
Steve Wynn

[On job creation in Las Vegas] I’m happy to say that in my career I’ve created new jobs of about 150-200,000 in this valley. Which means I’m partly responsible for the traffic jams so you can get angry at me for congestion. New jobs are being created by Encore.
Steve Wynn

I am not the chamber of commerce, I’m a niche operator… I’m dealing to a very special segment of the market and Encore is part of that.
Steve Wynn

The Wynn properties are top end places…
Steve Wynn

[On building] I’m not a high density person. I look for the quality of experience that comes from lack of compression as opposed to compression. And I think you put that in the middle of the strip and you get an entirely different kind of intellectual dynamic.
Steve Wynn

[On Encore design] Small places with no walls instead of a big place with walls
Steve Wynn

[On putting his elbow through a Picasso that he has just sold for $138 million dollars] That made me the cluzo of collectors. My right elbow after I’d sold it.
Steve Wynn

[On the painting disaster] I remember saying oh my god, oh my god I don’t believe I did that.
Steve Wynn



[On putting his elbow thorough a Picasso of his] I said thank God it was me and not anyone else.
Steve Wynn

[On the painting accident] I said… it’s a painting, no-one’s child got killed, no-one’s got cancer, no-one’s gonna die. It’s a painting. It’ll get fixed, it’s an overpriced painting. No painting’s worth a $150 million. Really they are actually.
Steve Wynn

I became Inspector Cluzo of collectors, a clumsy guy.
Steve Wynn

[On canceling the painting sale transaction] I got saved from making a mistake.
Steve Wynn

Our casino caters to very big players…
Steve Wynn

The thing that all customers have in common is that they like to play… The good news is that when they win they now have a period of time where they can play with the house’s roll and not their own. And so I’ve never met a gambler, a person who likes to play those games, who says ‘Oh boy, I’ve won, I’m never doing it again.’ It makes no sense… They wouldn’t be doing it in the first place if they thought that way. They only do it because they’d rather do that than have the money.
Steve Wynn

[On the ways to make money in a casino – don’t gamble] Or own a casino or buy stock in a casino.
Steve Wynn

I think that gaming should be considered an indulgence for entertainment and amusement.
Steve Wynn

I’ve been convinced my entire business career, that I need my employees more than they need me.
Steve Wynn

[On always wanting to build one more casino and doing it even better again] We’re students of this, never masters of it… And if you’re students of it, you keep thinking of new ways of putting elements together that would make people go ‘Wow’… And in Las Vegas, making people go ‘Wow’ is a career!
Steve Wynn



[On balancing his personal life and business life] Sometimes I do a good job, and other times I do a terrible job. I’m like everybody else I’m semi-successful in my personal life. I have good days and bad days… Welcome to the club.
Steve Wynn

I get ashamed of myself on a regular basis, and I get proud of myself on occasions.
Steve Wynn

It’s nice to have magic, but it’s very expensive.
Steve Wynn

Probably deep down inside I’m a developer. Developers love to create space. They’re romantic people.
Steve Wynn

How can you be sure? How can you be positive? How can anybody? Well you can’t in this world. What you can be sure of is that in the end, honest people will do the right thing.
Steve Wynn

I love designing things… The notion of creating a place where people go ‘Wow’, is something that does drive me.
Steve Wynn

I don’t think that people who have an alcoholic in the family hate wine. I think they understand the problem. If you’re that close to it you end up understanding it’s about the individual.
Steve Wynn

[On owning paintings and art] You never own any of this stuff, you just have custody. And frankly that’s enough. But then they’re meant to be shared with everybody.
Steve Wynn

I was born with a condition called retinitis pigmentosa and my vision is 20/30 if I wear glasses and 20/40 if I don’t. So I don’t wear glasses except in the sunlight. But my peripheral vision is impaired.
Steve Wynn

There is a very fine line between being creatively inspired and being a person of conceit with money. Self doubt, anxiety, are part of the game.
Steve Wynn



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