Lil Santa

What is Lil Santa?

The barge functioned as an intimate stage graced by legendary performers, including Dionne Warwick, Blues Traveler, Matt Goss, and CeeLo Green. Its final performer was another Vegas icon rumored to be powered by hydraulics: Wayne Newton. His “Up Close & Personal” residency in 2019 was the lounge’s final act before the pandemic shut down the Strip for 90 days and closed Cleopatra’s Barge for good in March 2020.

The lounge enjoyed one last moment in the spotlight in 2022, however, when Adele—on the eve of the debut of her long-delayed residency at the Colosseum—tweeted a photo of herself goofing around nervously on its abandoned deck.

The Cleopatra statue itself was removed to storage in late 2023, as the space was transformed into today’s Caspian’s Caviar and Cocktails.

How to play Lil Santa

At the same time, prediction market operators are facing regulatory tussles in the US. State regulators are moving to shut down the firms under gambling laws. The companies say their contracts should be regulated at the federal level as derivatives. 

However, the sector has grown substantially despite such disputes. Bernstein predicted in April that annual prediction market volume could reach $1 trillion by 2030. The research estimated volume was around $51 billion in 2025 and could grow to around $240 billion in 2026. 

The partnership with Yahoo Finance wraps up as prediction markets push for broader distribution across financial media, sports, and entertainment platforms. For Polymarket, the loss of the Yahoo Finance hub is one distribution channel, but other partnerships remain intact.

About Lil Santa

In fact, that 1982 R-J story stated that the neighborhood is “called ‘Naked City’ by Metro police officers.”

The way the phrase explodes onto the local paper, complete with context that the phrase was used by Metro, and the way it was used incessantly is all hard to ignore,” said Jeffrey Carlson, who publishes the Vintage Las Vegas history website, which features a post on Naked City.

Over the decades, Carlson said, he spoke to dozens of residents of the area in the ’60s and ’70s who “never heard the name.”