The Last Volcano
On the evening of July 17, 2024, the volcano erupted for the final time. Not the geological kind — the fifty-four-foot confection of steel, gas lines, and theatrical pyrotechnics that had stood sentinel at the front of The Mirage on the Las Vegas Strip for nearly thirty-five years, belching fire into the desert sky every fifteen minutes like some impossibly punctual Pompeii. The woman who had helped conceive the thing stood on the porte-cochère in the hundred-degree heat, dabbing Kleenex at her eyes, overtaken by feelings she had not expected and could not suppress. "This is a deeply personal place for us," Elaine Wynn said, her voice catching. Her daughters, Kevyn and Gillian, had grown up treating The Mirage as a third sibling, she explained — they never felt that way about the other properties. The volcano, she said, had been "the beginning of a streak of crazy ideas that always came true."
She was eighty-two, the largest individual shareholder in Wynn Resorts, the last of the generation of casino visionaries who had, through some alchemy of ambition, taste, and reckless optimism, transformed a desert truck stop into a global entertainment capital. Her ex-husband — the man whose name still blazed in copper lettering on the towers visible from her seventeenth-floor dining room — had been ousted six years earlier in a cloud of sexual misconduct allegations, exiled to Palm Beach with a new wife.
Kirk Kerkorian was dead. Sheldon Adelson was dead. The properties they'd all built had been absorbed into publicly traded conglomerates run by hired fund managers and marketing executives. The founders' era was over, and here was its last surviving architect, watching a machine she'd helped design go dark for good.
But what made the moment acute was not nostalgia. It was the fact that Elaine Wynn had always been the one standing slightly off-center in the frame — the aesthetic partner, the "casino wife," the woman Vogue once called "the unofficial queen of Las Vegas" in a caption that managed to be both a coronation and a diminution. For decades, the public narrative had belonged to Steve. The Mirage was Steve's vision. Bellagio was Steve's masterpiece. The volcano was Steve's crazy idea. Only now, with the Strip's final volcano exhaling its last breath, was the fuller story becoming legible: the woman who had argued to set the building back from the sidewalk, who had told her husband not to "Reno-ize the Strip," who had seen in a glass sculptor's lap pool the ceiling installation that would define the Bellagio lobby for a generation, who had co-founded not one but two resort companies, who had fought her way back onto a board that tried to eject her, who had spent $142.4 million on a Francis Bacon triptych and let the art world assume a man had bought it — this woman had been building something all along. The question was what.
By the Numbers
Elaine Wynn's Empire and Influence
~9%Stake in Wynn Resorts at time of death
$2.1BEstimated net worth (Forbes, 2024)
$142.4MPaid for Bacon's Three Studies of Lucian Freud (2013)
50+Years in the casino resort industry
1.62MChildren served annually by Communities in Schools under her board leadership
$50MPersonal pledge to LACMA's new building
17Years as chair of Communities in Schools national board
Bingo and Blind Dates
The origin story begins, as so many Las Vegas origin stories do, somewhere decidedly unglamorous. Elaine Pascal was born on April 28, 1942, in New York City, into a middle-class Jewish family. She grew up between the city and Miami Beach — a geography that would later rhyme with the bicoastal, bi-desert life she built — and enrolled at
George Washington University, where she studied political science. She was eighteen when she met Steve Wynn on a blind date; he was nineteen, a student at the University of Pennsylvania pursuing English literature, a fraternity kid at Sigma Alpha Mu whose father ran bingo parlors in Maryland and had changed the family name from Weinberg to Wynn to dodge antisemitism. They married in 1963, the same year Steve's father died on the operating table during open-heart surgery, leaving behind the bingo business and $350,000 in gambling debts.
The couple worked the bingo parlors together. This fact tends to get compressed into a single subordinate clause in Steve's biography, but it is worth pausing over. Elaine, freshly married, her bachelor's degree barely dry, spent her Sundays in Maryland bingo halls, learning the rhythms of the gambling business — the cash flow, the customers, the fragile psychology of a room where people come to lose. They paid off the debts. Then, in 1967, they moved to Las Vegas with a new baby and $75,000, enough for a 3 percent stake in the Frontier Hotel and Casino.
Las Vegas in 1967 was between acts. The Rat Pack era was guttering out.
Howard Hughes, the agoraphobic billionaire, had installed himself in the Desert Inn's penthouse and was buying properties with the compulsive detachment of a man playing Monopoly against himself. The mob's grip on the casino industry was loosening but not yet broken. Into this interregnum came the Wynns — young, ambitious, and possessed of complementary talents that would take decades for the outside world to properly disaggregate.
The Education of Taste
Steve Wynn's genius was for spectacle, for the grand gesture, for the kind of operatic showmanship that could turn a vacant lot into a $630 million Polynesian fantasy. He was the dreamer, the Aquarius — Elaine's word — the "high-flier, fabulous developer, Renaissance man." But spectacle without taste is merely noise, and it was Elaine who provided the calibrating intelligence, the aesthetic grammar that made the noise into music.
Consider the Mirage. When Steve was designing the resort in the late 1980s, he wanted to push the building right up to the Strip, maximizing frontage. It was Elaine who objected. "If you bring it close to the Strip," she told him, "people aren't going to appreciate the towers. Consider setting it back so that as people walk by and drive by, they'll have a point of view that gives them an appreciation of the whole building." They agreed. But the setback created a problem — a vast, dead expanse between the sidewalk and the entrance. Steve's solution was the volcano. Elaine's instinct had created the spatial condition that required the resort's most iconic feature.
This pattern — Elaine shaping the spatial and aesthetic logic, Steve filling it with showmanship — repeated across every property. At the Bellagio, it was Elaine who visited Dale Chihuly's home, saw the glass installation at the bottom of his lap pool, and said, "I want that in my ceiling in the Bellagio lobby." The resulting piece, Fiori di Como, became perhaps the most viewed work of contemporary art in America, greeting millions of guests in a space that was not a museum but a casino — a radical act of democratization disguised as interior decoration. She oversaw the architecture, the interiors, the employee uniforms. She was the one who insisted, "Don't Reno-ize the Strip," a three-word manifesto against the tawdry that functioned as a design philosophy for two decades of development.
The volcano was the beginning of a streak of crazy ideas that always came true. These ideas were compelling, and part of a pattern we established with all of our properties.
None of this was invisible at the time, exactly. People in Las Vegas knew. The employees knew — Michael Smith, the interior designer who later became her friend, would recall that walking the casino floor with Elaine was "like the tracking shot scene from Hello, Dolly!: Every valet, server, and floor manager seemed to come out of the woodwork to nod or say hello. They loved her, and she knew most of them by name." But the public narrative consistently assigned credit to the singular male genius. It was Steve Wynn's Mirage. Steve Wynn's Bellagio. Steve Wynn's biggest gamble.
Married, Divorced, Married, Divorced
The marriage was the architecture, and the architecture was the marriage. They divorced in 1986. They remarried in 1991 — after Steve opened The Mirage with Elaine while they were still divorced, a fact that should tell you everything about the nature of the partnership. They co-founded Wynn Resorts in 2002, alongside Japanese businessman Kazuo Okada. They divorced again in 2010.
"We have had a peculiar relationship," Elaine told Fortune in 2015, with the kind of candor that reads as understatement. "We have been married and divorced, married and divorced, but we have been partners all our lives. We have been together since we were 18 years old. Well, he was 19 when I met him. I was 18. And nobody knows this man better than I do."
The second divorce decree, signed on January 5, 2010, by Judge T. Arthur Ritchie Jr. in Las Vegas, noted that the Wynns had "personalities and dispositions so deep as to be irreconcilable, which render it impossible … to continue a normal marital relationship with each other." The property settlement gave Elaine sole control of more than 11 million shares, worth $741 million on the day of the split. The case was sealed. Steve married British socialite Andrea Hissom the following year, at the Wynn Encore resort, with Clint Eastwood as best man and
Donald Trump among the guests.
But there was something Elaine said after the divorce that cuts closer to the essential truth: "Steve and I have been partners for over 40 years. I don't think there will ever be a time when he's not my partner in some fashion or other." This was not sentiment. It was prophecy. Because the shares she held — the stake that represented her life's work — would become the instrument of her next act, and the partnership, now adversarial, would define the final decade of both their public lives.
The Board Fight
In April 2015, Wynn Resorts' board of directors announced that it would not renominate Elaine Wynn for a board seat she had held for thirteen years. She had co-founded the company. She owned 9.4 percent of it, worth approximately $1.2 billion. And the board — a collection of white male directors, several of them close personal friends of Steve Wynn — decided she was no longer needed.
She nominated herself.
What followed was one of the most unusual corporate governance battles in American history: a co-founder campaigning for her own board seat against the company she had built, traversing the country to court institutional investors, while her ex-husband — who owned 9.9 percent and was contractually required to vote his shares to reelect her — sat in the CEO's chair. "Why would you want to be on a board of directors that doesn't want you?" Fortune asked her. Her answer was characteristically blunt: "Because it is my heart and soul and my life's work and my professional career. And it represents the most significant portion of my net worth. And I have earned the right to stay on the board and oversee the next phase of dynamic growth. I cofounded that company. It's like my candy store, to put it bluntly."
Men may say to their girlfriends or wives, "Let's go to Vegas for the weekend." But it's the women that tell them where they want to stay, what shows they want to see, what restaurants they'd like to go to.
The observation was not merely a feminist talking point. It was a business argument, rooted in decades of watching consumer behavior in properties she had designed. She understood something the board apparently did not: that the Las Vegas experience was, at its core, a purchase decision shaped by women, and that forfeiting the insight of the only woman on the board was not just a diversity failure but a strategic one.
She won the seat. But the real battle was still coming.
January 2018
On January 26, 2018, The Wall Street Journal published an article detailing dozens of sexual misconduct allegations against Steve Wynn, spanning decades — allegations involving casino employees, patterns of behavior that multiple people within the company's orbit had allegedly known about or helped conceal. Steve Wynn denied all nonconsensual behavior. Within days, he resigned as chairman and CEO of Wynn Resorts and as finance chair of the Republican National Committee. He sold his entire stake in the company. The University of Pennsylvania revoked his honorary doctorate and stripped his name from campus facilities. The $2.6 billion Massachusetts resort under construction was renamed from Wynn Boston Harbor to Encore Boston Harbor.
For Elaine Wynn, the revelations were both devastating and catalytic. She had been fighting for years — through the divorce, through the board battle, through a multiyear legal war over her ability to freely control her shares — to establish herself as an independent force within the company. Now, suddenly, the man whose name was on the building was gone, and the woman whose name was not on the building was its largest individual shareholder and most prominent defender.
In May 2018, she filed an investor presentation with the SEC under the banner "Restore WYNN." It was a forty-odd-page document, precise and lacerating, that urged shareholders to vote to withhold support from director John J. Hagenbuch — a member of the special committee investigating the sexual harassment allegations who was, she argued, too close a personal friend of Steve Wynn to investigate him credibly. She demanded inspection of the company's stock ledger under Nevada Revised Statutes 78.105. She was not seeking a board seat for herself, she emphasized. She was seeking governance reform.
The three leading proxy advisory firms — ISS, Glass Lewis, and Egan-Jones — all recommended voting with her.
What is remarkable about the "Restore WYNN" presentation is its tone. There is no bitterness, no score-settling, no visible rage — though anyone who has lived through two divorces from the same person, watched that person's name become synonymous with a company she co-built, and then watched him accused of decades of sexual misconduct might be forgiven for a little venom. Instead, the document is coolly institutional, focused on shareholder value, governance deficiencies, and the imperative of transforming the company "from a corporate governance laggard into a corporate governance leader." It reads like the work of someone who has spent fifty years learning to subordinate the personal to the strategic — and who understood that the most powerful move, in this particular game, was to be the adult in the room.
The Candy Store and the Schoolhouse
There is a temptation, when telling the story of Elaine Wynn, to frame it as a narrative of emergence — the woman who stepped out of her husband's shadow. The temptation should be resisted, because it implies she was ever entirely in it. Even during the years of partnership, Elaine Wynn was building a parallel career in philanthropy and education that owed nothing to Steve's vision and everything to her own.
It started almost immediately upon arrival in Las Vegas. She looked at the city's schools and was appalled. "I was concerned because we had the highest dropout rate in the country," she told DuJour, "and could not understand how that was possible in a state that seemed to be flourishing, lots of resources and lots of glamour." The dissonance — a city of spectacular wealth producing children who couldn't finish high school — became the organizing problem of her philanthropic life.
In 1993, she met Bill Milliken, the founder of Communities in Schools, the nation's largest dropout prevention organization. Milliken was a former street worker from Pittsburgh who had built a national network around a deceptively simple idea: that schools should be the delivery point for the social services — food, clothing, mental health support, mentoring — that children in poverty need before they can begin to learn. Elaine Wynn didn't just write a check. She founded the first CIS affiliate in Las Vegas, which grew into CIS of Nevada, eventually serving more than 100,000 students in 118 high-needs schools. She joined the national board in 1999, became its chair in 2007, and held the position for seventeen years — longer than she served on any corporate board.
Her education work was not ceremonial. Nevada's past five governors drafted her into leadership positions addressing public education. In 2011, she co-chaired the state's Blue Ribbon Education Reform Task Force, which produced new reform legislation. Governor Brian Sandoval appointed her to the Nevada State Board of Education in 2013 and again in 2015; she was twice elected its president and served until December 2020. She chaired the UNLV Foundation for eight years, shifting its focus from athletics to academics. An elementary school in the Las Vegas valley bears her name. It was dedicated in 1991 — three years before Bellagio's fountains first danced.
Elaine dreamt at a scale that many of us could not see without her vision. Because of this, and during her tenure, Communities In Schools built the largest youth-serving non-profit working inside schools, lifting barriers at a measure only she could envision for us.
The education work illuminates something essential about Elaine Wynn's operating system. She thought in terms of experience — not the anodyne corporate-strategy use of the word, but the phenomenological one. A casino guest's experience began not at the gaming table but at the moment they saw the building from the sidewalk. A child's educational experience began not in the classroom but at breakfast, or the lack of one. In both domains, she was relentlessly focused on the conditions that preceded the ostensible main event.
$142.4 Million and the Assumption of Masculinity
In November 2013, at Christie's auction house in New York, an anonymous bidder won Francis Bacon's 1969 triptych Three Studies of Lucian Freud for $142.4 million, smashing the record for the most expensive artwork ever sold at auction. The art world exploded with speculation. Reporters called Steve Wynn. Hedge fund managers were named. Arabian collectors. Nobody guessed a woman.
"They were saying it will probably be on the wall of a hedge fund guy or in the desert in Arabia," Elaine Wynn recalled years later. "I remember being offended that speculation centered on men, and nobody thought that a woman would either have the money or the balls."
The remark is funny — deliberately so — and it is also a distillation of her entire career experience. She had spent five decades building, designing, funding, and governing casino resorts in one of the most testosterone-driven industries on earth, and still the default assumption was that any act of major financial agency must have a man behind it. The Bacon purchase was her first major acquisition since the divorce, and it was a declaration of independence executed in the only language the art world and the financial press reliably understood: record-breaking expenditure.
Her collecting had begun modestly in the 1980s — a journey she shared with her daughters, Kevyn and Gillian. By the 2020s, the collection spanned 150 years of modernism: J.M.W. Turner, Joan Mitchell, Richard Diebenkorn, Francis Bacon, El Anatsui. Christie's Deputy Chairman Sonya Roth called her "a friend, mentor and role model" and noted that "everything is the best of its kind." On November 17, 2025 — seven months after her death — Diebenkorn's Ocean Park #40 from her collection sold at Christie's for $17,655,000.
The art was not decoration. It was infrastructure for a vision of Las Vegas that Elaine Wynn had been constructing for decades — the idea that a city built on gambling could become a city built on culture. At the Bellagio, she and Steve had commissioned Chihuly's Fiori di Como and opened the Bellagio Gallery of Fine Art, the first art gallery on the Strip, featuring Picasso, O'Keeffe, and Warhol. "The Bellagio was the change of everything," as Las Vegas art advisor Michele C. Quinn put it. "The hotel brought art to the people, with the unexpected placement in a casino, and a far greater reach than a museum."
But Elaine's ambition went further. She wanted the real thing — not art in a casino but art in a museum. The institution that did not yet exist but that she had been dreaming of for decades.
The Museum That Isn't There Yet
The conversation that would become the Las Vegas Museum of Art began, as consequential conversations sometimes do, with a casual observation. Michael Govan, CEO of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art — a tall, professorial figure who had led LACMA through its own agonizing reinvention under architect Peter Zumthor — had been visiting Las Vegas for years and couldn't understand why the largest city in America without a major art museum remained, stubbornly, the largest city in America without a major art museum. He mentioned this to Elaine Wynn. "Her response," Govan recalled, "was something like, don't get me started."
She got started. The partnership she forged between LACMA and the nascent Las Vegas Museum of Art was audacious: LACMA would open its vast permanent collection to exhibitions in Las Vegas, lending institutional credibility and curatorial infrastructure to a museum that did not yet have walls. Wynn personally pledged $50 million. She persuaded Nevada's governor to commit $5 million in state funds during a meeting ostensibly about education funding — walking out with more than she'd walked in for, a skill she had been perfecting since the bingo parlors. She recruited Pritzker Prize-winning architect Francis Kéré, the Burkina Faso-born, Berlin-based designer whose work was saturated with the idea that architecture should serve communities, not merely adorn them.
The museum was projected to open in 2028 on a 1.5-acre parcel in Symphony Park, just east of The Smith Center — a 90,000-square-foot building minutes from the Strip she had defined. It would be her final project, though she did not know this when she announced it. "This is my personal legacy," she told the Las Vegas Review-Journal in September 2024.
She died seven months later, on April 14, 2025, of heart failure, at her home in Los Angeles. She was eighty-two.
The Glue
After her death, the tributes arrived from every direction — senators, governors, museum directors, casino executives, elementary school teachers. But the observation that cuts deepest came from John L. Smith, the longtime Nevada journalist who had written a book about Steve Wynn in 1995 and had watched the couple's partnership from closer range than almost anyone.
"What I see Elaine in that casino partnership was really the glue that held it together," Smith said. "[Steve] had his own tremendous talents, his own obsessions and all of that ... but for her, she not only held the family together, but she brought something to that partnership that clearly raised the level of quality in the casino experience ... that kind of taste that people noticed later when she was outside the Wynn shadow. She emerged as a proud and public feminist, which you don't see a lot in Las Vegas with what you would have called a 'casino wife.'"
The word glue is not glamorous. It does not make for a good headline or a Hollywood biopic. But glue is what holds the spectacular to the structural, the volcano to the setback, the crazy idea to the execution. Glue is the thing you don't notice until it's gone and everything falls apart.
Mellody Hobson — president of Ariel Investments, chair of Starbucks, one of the most powerful women in American finance — had her own word for it. Among Elaine Wynn's friends, Hobson said, they called her something specific. "The joke among our friends is we call her our godmother. A godmother is someone looking out for you, who is nurturing and supporting you."
A Taxonomy of Homes
In her final years, Elaine Wynn maintained homes in Las Vegas, Beverly Hills, New York, Miami, and Sun Valley, Idaho. The multiplicity was not mere wealth on display. Each home corresponded to a dimension of her identity: Las Vegas for the casino empire she'd built and the city she was trying to culturally elevate; Beverly Hills for the art world and LACMA, where she served as board co-chair; New York for Christie's auction rooms and the national philanthropic circuit; Sun Valley for the network of aging finance titans and former governors whom she hosted at elaborate birthday parties on horse ranches.
The Las Vegas apartment was the most revealing. During the pandemic, she had called Michael S. Smith — the decorator of the Obama White House, whom she'd met at a Kennedy Center Honors event — and asked if he'd redesign her three-bedroom condo on the seventeenth floor of a complex that had housed, at various points, the heads of Harrah's Entertainment, MGM, and Fontainebleau Resorts. "I'd design an Airstream trailer for you," Smith replied. She asked him to convert one bedroom into a closet for her fashion collection. She wanted something soft, feminine, personal — a refuge from the cacophony of the Strip visible from her window, where the copper towers bearing her ex-husband's name dominated the skyline.
The result was a space of travertine walls and custom Patrice Dangel ceiling lights, where an El Anatsui tapestry hung in the dining room and a Richard Diebenkorn in the living room, and where, on mornings, Elaine Wynn took her coffee beside Francis Bacon's three screaming studies of Lucian Freud.
What the Name Means
She kept the name. The divorce decree specified it: "Elaine Farrell Pascal Wynn." She could have reverted to Pascal. She had been Elaine Pascal when she met Steve Wynn on that blind date, had been Elaine Pascal when she worked the bingo parlors, had been Elaine Pascal when she made her first trip to Las Vegas with a baby and $75,000 and a husband who had not yet imagined a volcano.
But she kept the name, and the name kept her tethered to the company she had co-founded and the city she had co-built and the legacy she refused to cede. When she appeared before the Massachusetts Gaming Commission in 2019, as regulators deliberated whether Wynn Resorts could retain its casino license in the wake of her ex-husband's disgrace, she said simply: "I'm here because I am team Wynn."
The name was not Steve's name. It was not originally even the family's name — it was a invention, a rebrand, a word Michael Weinberg had chosen in 1942 to shield his newborn son from antisemitism. Wynn. To win. The name was aspirational before it was dynastic, and Elaine Wynn — who had done more than anyone to give it meaning in the world of luxury hospitality — understood that names belong to those who earn them.
On the night she died, the Sphere and every tall, bright hotel on the Las Vegas Strip went dark at 8:30. For a city that never turns off its lights, the gesture was the closest thing to silence. In the lobby of the Bellagio, Chihuly's Fiori di Como — two thousand hand-blown glass flowers in a ceiling she had dreamed into existence after visiting a sculptor's lap pool — kept catching whatever ambient light remained. A thing of beauty is a joy forever: the Keats line she had inscribed on a stone in the rose garden she donated to UNLV in 1989, in honor of her mother, Lee Pascal. The mother's name on a garden. The husband's name on the towers. Her own name on an elementary school, a palliative care program, an arts education studio, a wing of LACMA, and a museum that did not yet exist but that a city full of people were now, in her absence, determined to build.
