Matan Adelson

Origins and early life

Matan Adelson was born in Los Angeles in 1999, the youngest son of the casino entrepreneur Sheldon Adelson and of the Israeli-American physician and philanthropist Miriam Adelson, and spent most of his childhood in Las Vegas.

Work and career

He took a degree in economics at Stanford University, studying sports management as part of it, and in 2021 he made aliyah and settled in Israel. On 1 June 2023 he bought ninety per cent of the basketball club Hapoel Jerusalem for twenty million dollars, the remaining tenth staying with the club's fan association. That August he brought in Alon Kremer, back from the National Football League in the United States, as chief executive, and the former NBA guard Gal Mekel as consultant and minority shareholder.

In the season that followed the team won the Israeli State Cup in 2024 and finished fourth in the league, and he set out to make it, in his words, the face of Israeli basketball and the team of the Jewish people. In May 2025 the club bid for a three-year EuroLeague licence, ready to pay the five-million-euro fee, and by September 2026 it had reached the second and final stage of the process for a permanent licence. His Jewish identity is stated in his own words, I'm a very proud Jew, which he told Jewish Insider in June 2024, a year after he had spoken of his deep connection to Israel and of the honour of representing Jerusalem.

In 2023 the Jerusalem Post named him, beside his mother, among its fifty most influential Jews, under the heading of two generations of philanthropists.