Billionaire Adelson Ordered to Face Newspaper Antitrust Lawsuit

Billionaire Sheldon Adelson—the casino magnate, media mogul, and GOP megadonor—must face claims that he tried to drive a rival newspaper out of business by “weaponizing” its decades-old “joint operating agreement” with his Las Vegas Review-Journal, a federal judge ruled.

Judge Gloria M. Navarro let most of the Las Vegas Sun’s antitrust lawsuit move forward, rejecting Adelson’s argument that the cooperative arrangement between the two papers, and their sale as a “single product,” made the idea of competition between them implausible.

In “assuming” there’s “no actual economic competition,” Adelson and the Review-Journal overlooked the Sun’s “incentives to pursue editorial and news-gathering ...