Golden Nugget owner lays off 40,000 employees at casino, hotel and restaurant empire

Tilman Fertitta, the Texas billionaire who owns Golden Nugget casinos and restaurants such as Del Frisco’s and Bubba Gump Shrimp, announced Tuesday he had to temporarily lay off roughly 40,000 workers to limit the economic damage caused by coronavirus shutdown losses.

Fertitta is also calling on the government to allow businesses to reopen at limited capacity in a couple of weeks to avoid economic disaster, Dallas News reports.

"I think what we are doing with the shut-down is good but in a few weeks people will need to be around people," Fertitta said in an interview with Bloomberg on Tuesday. "Otherwise you are going to go into an economic crisis that is going to take us years to dig ourselves out of."

He said restaurants and casinos could be allowed to operate at 30% to 40% of capacity to soften the economic impact of the restrictions and allow companies to stay in business.

All of Fertitta’s casinos have been ordered to shut and even the restaurants that are operating by offering take-out are only bringing in 4% to 5% of their typical business. His company has been burning through a few million dollars of cash per day.

"We are doing basically no business," he said. "This is very hard on a lot of working families but we have to survive or there is no company."