Voting Station

Sol Kerzner

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Entrepreneur

The Resume

    (August 23, 1935-March 21, 2020)
    Born in Durban, South Africa
    Founded the Southern Sun Hotel Group, Sun International, and One & Only Resorts
    Founded the Sun City resort in Bophuthatswana (1979) and the Mohegan Sun Casino in Connecticut (1996)
    Purchased Paradise Island in the Bahamas (1994), redeveloped it into Atlantis Paradise Island
    Founded Atlantis: The Palms in Dubai (2008)
    Knighted for services to the Bahamas (2010)

Why he might be annoying:

    He was married four times, divorced three times.
    He was a chain smoker.
    He took advantage of Bophuthatswana's pseudo-independent status* by having Sun City offer gambling, topless revues, and other forms of entertainment banned in South Africa. (*In the late 1970s, South Africa tried to make itself a white-majority country by declaring that its black residents were actually citizens of independent homelands that physically occupied a small portion of the country. No other nations recognized these homelands as independent states.)
    His resort became a symbol of apartheid thanks to the protest single 'Sun City.'
    He made a deal with the finance minister of Bophuthatswana that 90% of the taxes paid by entertainers playing at Sun City would be funneled back to Sun International.
    He paid a 5 million rand ($900,000) bribe to the president of Transkei to secure a monopoly on gambling in that homeland (1986).
    It was rumored that the decision by the post-apartheid government to not press any charges against him may have been related to the hefty donations he made to the African National Congress and Nelson Mandela's presidential campaign.
    He was one of the contacts in sex offender Jeffrey Epstein's 'little black book.'

Why he might not be annoying:

    He founded the first five-star hotel in South Africa (1964).
    Black and white patrons of Sun City were allowed to mingle freely.
    Nelson Mandela asked him to arrange the VIP functions at his presidential inauguration (1994).
    His son Howard, aka Butch, died in a helicopter crash while scouting resort sites in the Dominican Republic (2006).
    He received a lifetime achievement award from the International Hotel Investment Forum (2018).

Credit: C. Fishel


Featured in the following Annoying Collections:

Year In Review:

    In 2023, Out of 1 Votes: 100% Annoying
    In 2022, Out of 8 Votes: 50.0% Annoying