Derek Stevens, owner of Circa, The Golden Gate and The D, took a big gamble on remaking Downtown Las Vegas. He now has a portfolio of properties worth more than $1 billion—including the world’s largest sportsbook and Sin City’s biggest pool.
At nearly six o’clock on a Tuesday night in late December, about 500 gamblers are lined up at the Golden Gate casino on Fremont Street in Downtown Las Vegas to pick up a ticket for a couple of free drinks with Derek Stevens, its billionaire owner. The dancing bartenders, as they are known, dressed in bralettes, panties and go-go boots, shake their hips to the Black Eyed Peas’ “I Gotta Feeling” as two guests make their way over to shake his hand.
“Every casino needs its own attraction, and people are attracted to an open bar,” says Stevens, 58, who bought this property, the oldest hotel and casino in Las Vegas, in 2006 as well as The D, which is just down the street, five years later. Across Fremont is his crown jewel: Circa, which he opened in 2020 at a cost of $1 billion.
Each drink voucher comes with a golden envelope, which usually contains $5 pre-loaded on a card but it could be as high as $1,000. The Golden Gate hosts this very happy hour every night, 7 days a week, and it’s safe to say that gamblers spend more money on the slots than they cost the casino with their free drinks. An employee hands Stevens a microphone and the music stops.
“I’ve always thought that there is nothing better in Vegas than if you can get a couple of drinks in you and maybe hit a jackpot,” he says to the crowd. “That’s how the night starts. And I appreciate you wanting to have your night start here.”
Stevens, who is wearing a white oxford under a blue suit with a Richard Mille watch, is the last of a dying breed in Las Vegas: the independent casino mogul. With his three properties, which he owns with his younger brother, Greg, Stevens is worth $1.2 billion, Forbes estimates. In a town built by legends like Jay Sarno, Kirk Kerkorian, Benny Binion, and later reinvented by Steve Wynn and Sheldon Adelson, almost all the big operators today, from MGM to Caesars, sold their land and buildings to REITs, keeping the operations and paying rent. But Stevens owns it all, even the dirt under his properties. And while casinos on the Strip have been hit hard by a decline in foreign visitors in the past year, Downtown Vegas has been buoyed by American gamblers, attracted to cheaper hotel rooms, the walkability of Fremont Street and the spectacle of Circa.
Making A Splash: Circa’s Stadium Swim is Las Vegas’ largest pool. Heated to 98 degrees in the colder months, it has a 143-foot-tall TV screen for watching sports.
Circa
Standing 60 stories high on the corner of Fremont and Main Street and looking like a cruise ship, Circa is the only high-end game in town when it comes to Downtown Las Vegas. Boyd’s Fremont Casino is bright and nostalgic, yet depressing with a tiny sports book, old slots and even older customers. At Tilman Fertitta’s Golden Nugget, you might run into your aunt, who could have also decorated the place. And then there’s Binion’s, the casino that started the World Series of Poker in 1970—and looks like it hasn’t been renovated since.
But Circa is something else. It’s an attraction, which, after all, is what Vegas is all about. With the world’s largest sportsbook spanning three floors with movie-theater style seating, a screen big enough to broadcast 19 games at a time with the odds, and Stadium Swim located outside, Sin City’s biggest pool, which is heated to 98 degrees in the colder months, and a 143-foot-tall TV screen, people come just to see the place. Ever the showman, Stevens calls it an “aquatic theater” and believes he built “the best pool in the fucking history of the world.”
While hotels along the Strip have been struggling in the past year, with Circa, which is an adults-only property, Stevens got something right, particularly for the Downtown Vegas crowd. Forbes estimates that the resort makes more in gambling revenue than Boyd’s three properties on Fremont combined, about $280 million a year, or 35% of all casino revenue in Downtown. Since Circa opened in October 2020, Downtown’s gaming revenue has grown 40%. While all that growth cannot be solely attributed to Circa, the hotel has clearly helped bring Fremont Street back from the pandemic lows.
Winning Strategy: “I’ve always thought that owning the land, owning your own dirt, was something important,” Stevens says about buying the parcels that Circa, The Golden Gate and The D occupy.
The Golden Gate and The D
He has become so high-profile that he has hosted billionaires like Steve Cohen at his property, as well as President Donald Trump, who came to Circa shortly after being inaugurated in January 2025. In 2023, a con man posed as him, over the phone, and convinced one of his employees to meet him in a parking lot with $1.1 million from the Circa cage. (The plot worked, but the crook got arrested.) Stevens also has a touch of outlaw in him as he was once fined $250,000 by the Nevada gaming authorities for giving two gamblers a total of $25,000 worth of chips at the Golden Gate and The D without any of the necessary paperwork. (He denies any wrongdoing.)
“Stevens is doing a lot of the things his predecessors did, and Circa is doing them bigger,” says Mike Green, who teaches history at UNLV. “If you think of how Adelson has died, Wynn had his issues, Phil Ruffin has major casinos on the Strip but isn’t exactly a mogul, Stevens might be the last mogul.”
Stevens disagrees. “Those guys are big guys,” he says. “I’m just a guy selling beer at the end of the bar.”
Born in Grosse Point, Michigan, Stevens’ father was an architect and his mother was a math teacher whose family had started a sizable fastener business in the auto industry in the early 1900s. By 1993, after graduating from the University of Michigan, he became CEO of the family business, Cold Heading Co., which now owns a few other automotive companies and two manufacturing facilities. He is still CEO today but doesn’t talk much about the company.
“I will be as open as possible: it’s a couple of guys in a garage,” he says.
It’s a rare instance of modesty from the braggadocious Stevens, considering that Cold Heading is a leading supplier of nuts and bolts to the auto industry and this family business has thrown off so much cash that Stevens and his brother were able to buy The Golden Gate and The D. For Circa, they funded their $500 million investment through profits from their first two casinos.
In May 2006, Stevens was looking to move his investment portfolio to a state without income taxes. One afternoon, he and his friends, wearing t-shirts and flip-flops, wound up on Fremont Street, and walked into the Golden Gate, then owned by Mark Brandenburg. Stevens used a house phone and Brandenburg, whose assistant was out that day, happened to pick up. Stevens told him that he was looking to invest in a casino. He already had a small stake in the Rio and owned some debt belonging to the Riviera, but he told Brandenburg that he wanted to get into operating a casino. The two talked in his office and $7.5 million later, Stevens walked away with a 50% stake in the Golden Gate.
By 2008, Stevens was licensed by the Nevada Gaming Control Board and eventually bought Brandenburg’s remaining stake for about $10 million. Last year, he bought the land under the hotel for another $19 million.
“I’ve always thought that owning the land, owning your own dirt, was something important,” he says in his office at Circa. “Maybe I’m a little too old school on that, seeing as all the properties on the Strip are selling their land.”
While that strategy can limit access to capital, it also reduces risk. “When there’s a slow down or if there’s a big recession, the rent payment’s always due,” he says.
In 2011, Stevens and his brother purchased nearby Fitzgerald’s, an Irish-themed casino, and completed a 36-story renovation, renaming it The D. Four years later, the duo bought the aging Las Vegas Club for around $40 million, plus a handful of other properties all on the same city block, including the storied strip club Glitter Gulch, known for its famous neon sign of a cowgirl named Vegas Vickie, which is now glows inside Circa.
They also bought Mermaids and La Bayou casinos. The initial plan was to expand and renovate the Vegas Club, but with a total of eight parcels, the Stevens brothers owned the entire city block—except for a 20-foot by 100-foot t-shirt shop and a small office building. Their father then gave them the idea to ditch the renovations and dream even bigger.
Realizing his father was right, he walked into the t-shirt shop, and approached the owner, Haim Gabay. They made a deal for $13.5 million for the tiny store, which ended up being the most expensive per square foot that Stevens bought while acquiring his site.
Once Stevens owned the whole block, the brothers went on the road with Credit Suisse to raise $450 million in debt, along with the $500 million the Stevenses put up. They targeted an opening date of December 31, 2020. If they opened by then, they could take advantage of a tax code provision allowing them to write off the whole project, not pay taxes for a few years, and start paying off their mountain of debt.
“If we didn’t have the accelerated depreciation, we couldn’t have penciled this up. It was that significant,” says Stevens.
When Covid-19 arrived in March 2020, casinos across Las Vegas shuttered. He bet that Covid would not last forever, and if he wanted to get the tax write off and save his investment, he had to push forward. His project manager put them on a 24-hour construction schedule, and they opened nine weeks early, in October of that year.
“The bet worked out, but man, it was gut-wrenching,” says Stevens. “It might’ve taken five years off my life. I didn’t know if my entire career and everything I’ve ever done was going to get washed away.”
The payoff came the following year. “2021 and 2022 are two of the greatest years in Vegas history,” says Stevens, describing the post-pandemic rebound, which saw the city reap more than $1 billion in gaming revenue per month, a winning streak that continues to this day.
Stevens and his brother still have about $200 million in debt left to pay off, but Circa is in good shape and Downtown is strong, growing its gaming revenue by 2.4% between 2023 and 2024, while Las Vegas’ gaming revenue is down 1% in the same period.
“Timing is everything in Las Vegas, and Derek just hit the right time to do that,” says Brendan Bussmann, managing partner of B Global, a local consulting firm focused on gaming. “You got to have a little bit of genius in you and a little bit of crazy. You’re going to take some risks that most people aren’t going to believe in. That’s what made Sheldon great, that’s what made Steve Wynn great and that’s what allowed Derek to do what he’s done.”
Up on the 60th floor of Circa, which is called the Legacy Club, busts of Sam Boyd, Benny Binion, Howard Hughes, Kirk Kerkorian, Jay Sarno, Steve Wynn and others greet visitors coming off the elevator. When asked about his legacy, Stevens says he is too young to think about it.
Circa, he says, will not be his last project. In Symphony Park, just across the street, he and his brother own another 6.8 acres of land, which happens to be the last parcel in Downtown zoned for gaming.
“At some point,” he says, looking out towards his land, “we’ll have something cooking over there.”