Top 200 Collectors

Though the Fertitta brothers inherited their father’s casino business in Las Vegas, they increased their fortune by buying the declining mixed-martial-arts league Ultimate Fighting Championship in 2001 for $2 million and eventually selling their remaining stakes in UFC in August 2017, after building a company worth $5 billion. “It was probably the worst brand in the United States because of all of the negativity surrounding it,” Lorenzo told the Washington Post of the company’s growth. 

The brothers have been collecting art for more than 20 years, continuing in the footsteps of their father, Frank Fertitta Jr. The first work Frank Fertitta III acquired was William-Adolphe Bouguereau’s Morning Breakfast (1887), but he has since moved on to the likes of Damien Hirst, Christopher Wool, Brice Marden, and Richard Prince. The Fertittas’ collection is strong in American Pop and Abstract Expressionism. Frank Fertitta III has told ARTnews that his favorite piece is one of Warhol’s Flowers. “I have long been drawn to them. … I own several works of this subject in varying sizes.”

Under the brothers’ ownership, the Palms Hotel and Casino, which they sold to the San Manuel Band of Mission Indians for $650 million in 2021, became renowned for the number of marquee names decorating its walls and spaces, including pieces by Hirst, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Takashi Murakami, and KAWS. “Frank and Lorenzo thought we should give people a chance to see stuff that is more niche,” the Palms art curator Tal Cooperman told the New York Post. “They taught me a lot about blue-chip art, and I’m bringing in ideas from the street.”