One-Man Conglomerate
The Fertitta Portfolio
The holdings of a college dropout—restaurants, casinos, hotels, pleasure piers, and an NBA basketball team.
Sitting on the terrace of the Oak Room, the 25th-floor members-only sanctuary in Houston’s luxurious Post Oak Hotel, Tilman Fertitta is making his introductions when he spots an errant piece of potato chip on the floor. He instinctively scoops it up and discards it—though he does, in fact, own the joint, so there are plenty of wait staff at his disposal to do this sort of tidying up. But it’s second nature to a billionaire who learned the restaurant trade from the ground floor and can’t stifle his inner busboy.
Fertitta has stepped outside on this warm sponge of a Houston evening to escape the typically frigid air conditioning within—is every thermostat in this town set to 60 degrees in the summer?—that’s overmatching his standard dark T-shirt and jacket. But noise from the traffic on the I-610 freeway below is incessant, so he rises and prowls the terrace as if to assess any possibility of ending this acoustic outrage. “There must be something we can do,” he says.
Maybe he’ll have the highway moved.
Over the past four decades, Fertitta has built Fertitta Entertainment, a restaurant, gaming, hospitality, amusement, and sports conglomerate—and become a business celebrity, with his own TV show, Billion Dollar Buyer—by demonstrating an ability to pay attention to little things and pull off big deals in whatever proportion is necessary.
He became an entrepreneur at age 20. About 10 years later, after buying control of a small Houston-area restaurant company named Landry’s in late 1986, he embarked on a classic roll-up strategy, giving him 522 restaurants today under some 60 brands, including Mastro’s, Willie G’s, Bubba Gump Shrimp Co., Chart House, Saltgrass Steak House, Bill’s Bar & Burger, Morton’s, and, most recently, Del Frisco’s. Fertitta and his family also own four aquariums and a Hilton, a Holiday Inn, and a Westin, among other hotels, plus a Bentley and Rolls-Royce dealership. There’s the Pleasure Pier in Galveston and another one in Kemah, Texas. Oh, he has casinos, too. And an NBA basketball team. This year, those assorted businesses will generate around $4.6
