In December, Fertitta hopes to close on his fifth SPAC deal, the biggest transaction of his career, in which he will offload most of Landry’s holdings, including five Golden Nugget casinos and more than 500 restaurants (and billions in debt), to the rechristened Fertitta Entertainment. Thanks to creative SPAC financing and what appears to be some serious self-dealing, Fertitta has already increased his net worth, Forbes estimates, from $4.1 billion a year ago to $6.3 billion today. Instead, he’s getting richer by making use of the era’s hottest financial trend: the special purpose acquisition company, or SPAC. This time around, Fertitta could have ended up going broke under $4.6 billion in debt accumulated to build his empire. private, buying the 45% he didn’t own for $1.4 billion in cash after it had spent 17 years as a public company. In 2010, in the wake of the Great Recession, he took Landry’s Inc. In the 2001 downturn, he gobbled up troubled restaurant chains at a discount. “We always get bigger and stronger during tough times,” Fertitta says. But the one identity that has arguably made the biggest impact on his wealth is that of a sharp financial engineer with a history of cutting the public into and out of his ventures and taking on and offloading debt at opportune moments. You can describe the 64-year-old yacht, restaurant, casino and hotel owner in many ways: as a showman, risk taker, college dropout, detail guy, NBA owner (the Houston Rockets), reality show star (three seasons of Billion Dollar Buyer on CNBC) and the fellow who bought Donald Trump’s casino in Atlantic City out of bankruptcy in 2011 and made a success of it. “If you need to charter, you shouldn’t own it.” Asked if he ever rents out his yachts to defray costs, he summarily dismisses the question. 4, a 164-footer anchored in his hometown of Galveston, Texas. His fifth yacht, Boardwalk dwarfs the other ships docked at the Atlantis resort at Paradise Island, Bahamas. Fertitta’s favorite spot is the top deck, 74 feet above the sea and overlooking the hot tub. There are cabins to sleep 22 crew and 14 guests, who often arrive via a de rigueur helipad.

Fertitta lavished $150 million and nearly five years on this vessel, spending days with Dutch shipbuilder Feadship imposing his obsessive vision for six decks of plush carpets, marble surfaces, chromed fixtures and automatic sliding doors.

“We are expecting you-may I take your shoes?” says the uniformed crew member stationed at the bottom of the stairs leading up to the main deck of Tilman Fertitta’s new 252-foot yacht, Boardwalk. But now, the Golden Nugget casino owner is richer than ever thanks to seismic market shifts and his own ambitious SPAC strategy. When Covid lockdowns hit, Tilman Fertitta’s restaurants and casinos took a serious hit, and he had to lay off 40,000 workers.

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