I was reading the Forbes 400 list of richest Americans and realized that I had had encounters with several of these people over the years. Of course my meetings were Internet or tech trade publishing related. I was particularly interested in the paths taken by Sheldon Adelson and Patrick McGovern. Both made big money on covering tech through trade shows (Adelson) and tech magazines (McGovern).

Sheldon Adelson at number 3 on the list is quite amazing. Sheldon made his first big money by building and selling Comdex trade shows. While building Comdex Sheldon picked up the Sands Hotel in Las Vegas (where Comdex took place for many years). When Comdex was sold, Sheldon kept the hotel property. He tore it down and built the Venetian hotel. He now has gambling properties in Las Vegas and Macau and that is how one gets to be worth $20 billion.

Sheldon was super smart to sell Comdex at the high and then to move into gambling. Contrast this to Patrick McGovern of IDG (according to Forbes worth a mere $3 billion). McGovern created his trade tech publishing company in the 1970s and rode the microcomputing wave to great wealth.

Pat did not move into any other business as did Sheldon and has remained with trade tech publishing and trade shows and research. I presume Forbes figures that Pat liquified his IDG holdings over the years in order to arrive at his being worth $3 billion. I find it hard to believe that IDG (which Pat still owns) could possibly be worth but a tiny fraction of $3 billion. It would be interesting to see how Forbes magazine arrived at its calculation.