Inside gaming column: Casinos' newest pals: High netters

Who are our friends? Every decade or so marketing gurus find a new group of consumers who will be their salvation. It's not yuppies or boomers anymore. The newest demographic is 'high net-worth-individuals,' or high netters. And they are Las Vegas' best friends, or at least best friends for high-end resorts. The head count kept by the World Wealth Report shows the number of these individuals, with net investments of $1 million or more, doubled in the past decade to 9 million from 4.5 million. Their wealth has also doubled. As a group, they have $33 trillion to spend today compared with $16 trillion a decade ago. It's no wonder new Las Vegas resort developments are courting their newest friends.

Richard Branson, founder of Virgin Airways, probably has no peer for appealing to the new class of high- income "high netters." He has serious plans on the drawing board for a so-called "spaceship," set to fly within the decade. For the price of today's first-class ticket from Las Vegas to Paris, people will be able to fly from Australia to Los Angeles or Los Angeles to Paris in less than an hour, experience 20 minutes of weightlessness in space and see Earth from beyond the atmosphere. What a gas.

Another treat for the new class of "high netters" is the luxury condo-hotel now being built at the Cosmopolitan. Its beach club will be reminiscent of the original Americana in the heart of Acapulco, Mexico, where pool water seemed to flow over the edge in a waterfall to the ocean hundreds of feet below. Except here the illusion will be that the water spills from a sandy beach at the rooftop pool down to the Strip. It doesn't get much more magic than that, unless, of course, you have vertigo.

Much has been written lately about the likelihood or unlikelihood of top-level management changes at Harrah's Entertainment if the $15.5 billion sale to Apollo Management and Texas Pacific Group goes through. But private equity sources tell us analysts have it backward. Harrah's management has been in a bind between its massive real estate holdings and its stock being under pressure. The buyout, which is "unsolicited" perhaps in only a legal or technical sense, is a "brilliant" escape from that bind, competitors here said last week. If the buyout wins board approval, management gets to proceed without constant interference. If it fails to get board approval, top management could take a walk after creating the largest gaming company in the world. That threat is called power politics in Corporate America.

Gaming Wire Editor Rod Smith can be reached by e-mail at rsmith@reviewjournal.com or by phone at 477-3893.

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