Politics & Power Quote by Steve Wynn

Wynn is selling fear with the polish of a casino boss who understands that “uncertainty” is the most profitable emotion in the room. The line’s power is its studied vagueness: “No one has any idea what’s next” sounds like humility, but it’s a rhetorical land grab. If nobody knows, then any policy, any regulator, any reformer can be framed as reckless. The phrase doesn’t identify a culprit outright, yet it implies one: government, taxes, rules, Washington. In three beats, Wynn turns a complex recovery into a single villain - unpredictability - and positions business as the anxious, responsible party waiting for clarity.

The subtext is leverage. “Frightening to everybody” drafts the entire public into a boardroom complaint, collapsing the difference between a laid-off worker and a billionaire operator into the same shared dread. That flattening matters: it moralizes the needs of capital as the needs of society. When he says it’s “delaying the recovery,” he’s also quietly shifting agency away from corporate decision-makers. Investment isn’t withheld because profits are uncertain or because firms want better terms; it’s withheld because the climate is spooky.

Contextually, this kind of statement is a familiar post-crisis refrain, often surfacing when business leaders argue for tax cuts, deregulation, or policy “stability” that just happens to align with their interests. Coming from Wynn, whose empire runs on risk engineered into spectacle, the irony is sharp: he profits from managing uncertainty for guests, but demands its elimination when it comes from democratic governance.