KVIG Informative

Del Webb Corporation became Nevada’s first publicly traded casino operator six years before state law made room for a company like it. Sixty-five years later, the shareholder that owns more than a quarter of MGM Resorts International wants to undo the kind of public ownership Webb pioneered.

Del Webb’s history in Nevada gaming started with concrete, not cards. His construction company built the Flamingo in 1946, according to the University of Nevada, Las Vegas Lee Business School’s Nevada Business Hall of Fame. Webb kept building hotels on the Strip and downtown through the following decade.

His path into ownership ran through the Sahara. Milton Prell built the hotel in 1952 on the former site of a smaller casino called Club Bingo, operating it through the Sahara-Nevada Corporation, according to a University of Nevada, Las Vegas Special Collections history of the property. When the project’s original contractor, Max Maltzman, fell ill, Webb took over construction and later ownership of the site, the same source says.

In 1961 Webb’s publicly traded company bought the Sahara, the Mint and the Lucky Casino outright, becoming the first publicly traded corporation to operate a Nevada casino, according to the Lee Business School’s account. A separate University of Nevada, Las Vegas Special Collections finding aid on the company’s photograph collection independently credits Del Webb Corporation with that same distinction, naming the Mint Hotel and Casino in downtown Las Vegas as the property that carried it.

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Nevada’s 1955 Gaming Control Act had no real mechanism for a company structured like Webb’s. The law called for background investigation of the people holding a financial stake in a licensed casino, a standard built around private owners and unworkable for a corporation selling shares on the New York Stock Exchange. Nevada lawmakers did not begin studying how to reconcile the two until 1963, and spent six years on the question, according to the Legislative Counsel Bureau’s Policy and Program Report on gaming regulation.

The fix came in two pieces. The 1967 Legislature passed Senate Bill 470, enacted as Chapter 534 of the Statutes of Nevada, authorizing public corporations to own and operate gaming without licensing every individual shareholder, the same report says. The 1969 Legislature followed with Senate Bill 353, Chapter 220 of the Statutes of Nevada, giving the state tighter oversight of the corporate licensees the first bill had allowed in. Hilton, MGM, Holiday Inns, Ramada and Hyatt entered Nevada gaming once that framework existed, according to a Nevada gaming law textbook published through the University of Nevada, Las Vegas’s gaming research program.

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Webb’s company had not waited for that legal cover. It had already run casinos under public ownership for six years by the time the 1967 law passed. By 1972 Del Webb Corporation was Nevada’s largest gaming operator and the state’s largest private employer, according to the Lee Business School’s account.

The Nevada Gaming Commission still keeps a running list of every publicly traded company registered or reporting with it, an accounting the commission updates and posts monthly. MGM Resorts International sits on that list today. On June 1, 2026, People Incorporated, the holding company that already owns 26.1% of MGM’s stock, proposed taking the rest of the company private at $48.30 a share, according to People Incorporated’s own filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. The offer would leave People Incorporated holding just over half of a company built on the same public-market structure Del Webb forced Nevada regulators to reckon with before the state had written a rule for it.