Steve Wynn and Encore: How Wynn Las Vegas Became a Luxury Powerhouse

Steve Wynn spent close to 5 billion dollars building two hotel towers that refuse to show off from the street. Most Las Vegas resorts fight for attention with a free volcano, a pirate battle, or a wall of neon you can see from a mile away. Wynn Las Vegas and Encore do the opposite: they hide behind a 100-foot artificial mountain and make you walk inside to see anything at all. That bet on quiet luxury, on the old Desert Inn site Wynn bought after selling his last company, turned into one of the highest-earning resort complexes in Las Vegas history.

How did Steve Wynn get the money to build Wynn Las Vegas?

He sold his previous company for 6.6 billion dollars. In 2000, Wynn sold Mirage Resorts, the company behind The Mirage, Treasure Island and Bellagio, to MGM Grand. Wynn personally walked away with roughly 500 million dollars for his shares. That sale ended his run at the company he had spent two decades building, but it also handed him the cash to start over on his own terms.

He did not wait long. That same year, Wynn and his newly formed company, Wynn Resorts, bought the Desert Inn, an aging resort on the Strip, and closed it to make room for something new. To fund construction, he brought in outside financing, including a large investment from Japanese businessman Kazuo Okada and his company Aruze, which helped cover the early cost of the project before Wynn Resorts went public in 2002.

What was the Desert Inn before Steve Wynn bought it?

A resort with its own long, complicated history. The Desert Inn opened in 1950 as the fifth resort on the Las Vegas Strip. It was publicly fronted by Wilbur Clark, but the real money and control came from Moe Dalitz and a group of investors with ties to organized crime, who financed and ran the place behind the scenes for years.

In 1967, the eccentric billionaire Howard Hughes checked into the Desert Inn's top-floor penthouse and refused to leave when the hotel wanted the rooms back for high rollers. His solution was simple: he bought the entire resort for 13.25 million dollars. Hughes owned it for two decades before MGM took over in 1988. When Steve Wynn bought the property in 2000, he was reportedly giving his wife, Elaine Wynn, a birthday gift, in the form of the land under a brand-new resort built in her honor.

Why does Wynn Las Vegas hide its casino behind a mountain?

Because Steve Wynn wanted guests looking inward, not tourists gawking from the sidewalk. Every one of his earlier resorts had built its name on a free spectacle facing the Strip: the volcano at The Mirage, the pirate show at Treasure Island, the fountains at Bellagio. For his next project, Wynn deliberately did not repeat that formula. He said the goal was the beauty of the desert itself, not a copy of Rome or New York.

So instead of a show for passersby, Wynn Las Vegas hides almost everything behind a 100-foot artificial mountain, built at a cost of about 130 million dollars and planted with 1,500 trees, some of them moved over from the old Desert Inn golf course. Behind that mountain sits a 3-acre lake, a chain of waterfalls, and the animatronic Lake of Dreams show. Inside, an indoor botanical garden fills the casino with real trees, changing flowers and natural light, and restaurants sit apart from the gaming floor on purpose. Wynn's reasoning was blunt: people already know how to find a casino, they should not have to stumble past a slot machine on their way to dinner.

How much bigger did Encore make the resort?

Big enough to roughly double the room count and add a whole nightlife wing. Wynn Las Vegas opened on April 28, 2005, with 2,716 rooms and a 111,000 square foot casino, at a total cost of 2.7 billion dollars, the most expensive resort ever built at the time. It worked well enough that Wynn broke ground on a sister tower almost immediately, and Encore Las Vegas opened next door on December 22, 2008, at a cost of 2.3 billion dollars.

Encore added a 48-story tower with 2,034 rooms, connected directly to Wynn Las Vegas so the two operate as one complex sharing a casino floor, restaurants and a golf course. It also brought a different kind of energy: the 40,000 square foot XS Nightclub, the Encore Beach Club day club that opened in 2010, and a set of high-roller gaming salons on the top floor with floor-to-ceiling views over the Strip. Between the two towers, the complex now holds around 4,750 rooms and suites, more than 180,000 square feet of gaming space, and the only 18-hole golf course left on the Strip, a course Wynn kept and redesigned with architect Tom Fazio rather than paving over.

How does Wynn Las Vegas compare to other Strip resorts financially?

It regularly competes for the title of the Strip's single most profitable resort. Wynn Las Vegas and Encore's Las Vegas operations brought in about 2.57 billion dollars in revenue in 2024, up from 2.48 billion dollars the year before, and the complex has repeatedly traded places with Bellagio as the most profitable property on the Strip. The strategy behind that is deliberate: Wynn Resorts prices its rooms high and chases fewer, bigger-spending guests rather than filling every room at a discount, a mix of premium table games, high-end dining and nightlife that keeps margins wide even when occupancy is not maxed out.

The awards back up the positioning. Wynn Las Vegas and Encore have both repeatedly won the AAA Five Diamond Award and the Forbes Travel Guide Five-Star Award, putting them among a small handful of Forbes Five-Star resorts anywhere in the world. That is the whole model in one sentence: build for the guest who wants the best room in town and will pay for it, not the guest counting free drinks at a slot machine.

What happened to Steve Wynn?

He resigned from the company that carries his name after serious allegations against him became public. In January 2018, the Wall Street Journal published an investigation detailing decades of sexual misconduct allegations by former employees, including a settlement reportedly worth 7.5 million dollars tied to one case. Wynn has consistently denied the allegations, saying they were part of a campaign led by his ex-wife. Days after the report, in February 2018, he resigned as chairman and CEO of Wynn Resorts, and the board named company president Matt Maddox as his replacement.

Wynn did not stay invested for long either. In March 2018, he sold his entire remaining stake in Wynn Resorts, worth about 2.1 billion dollars, fully cutting his financial ties to the company. In 2023, he reached a settlement with Nevada gaming regulators, agreeing to pay a 10 million dollar fine and permanently step away from any role in the state's gaming industry, without admitting wrongdoing. Matt Maddox ran Wynn Resorts until early 2022, when Craig Billings took over as CEO, a role he still holds today. Wynn Las Vegas and Encore have kept performing at the top of the Strip under that new leadership, entirely separate from the man who built them.

The bottom line

Wynn Las Vegas and Encore succeeded because Steve Wynn refused to compete on the Strip's own terms. Every rival was building a bigger show for the sidewalk, so he built a mountain to hide behind it instead, then filled the inside with the kind of rooms, restaurants and gaming floors that make high-spending guests stay longer and come back. That bet on quiet luxury outlasted the man who made it: Wynn left the company under serious allegations in 2018, sold every share he owned, and Wynn Las Vegas has kept winning without him.

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