VEGAS MYTHS BUSTED: $9 Billion Halo Megaresort to Replace Luxor & Excalibur

Posted on: May 5, 2025, 07:21h. 

Last updated on: May 5, 2025, 10:12h.

Corey Levitan Read More
Expertise: Commercial Gaming, Entertainment, Expert Insight, Las Vegas, Restaurants, Las Vegas Myths.
  • A recent news story announced that Luxor and Excalibur are undergoing demolition and will be replaced with a $9 billion, 1,000-foot resort
  • The story, which featured AI-generated renderings, was immediately met with skepticism
  • Debunked as an April Fool’s prank, some people are still perpetuating the story’s claims online

Last month, a Facebook page posted the following: “BREAKING: Luxor & Excalibur Demolition Underway — New $9B Resort Set to Replace Iconic Landmarks.” It was accompanied by the AI rendering below…

BREAKING: Legit renderings of proposed resorts don’t include simulations of the resorts they’re replacing being imploded underneath them. (Image: Facebook)

“Inspired by the skyline of Dubai,” read the post from Las Vegas Parent Zone, the Halo Resort & Sky Casino has been “secretly in the works since 2023, with major investors from the Middle East and Silicon Valley.”

Set to open in summer 2028, the post continued, the Halo will consist of two 85-story “shimmering gold-and-glass towers with luxury suites, penthouses, and sky villas” and “the first-ever Sky Casino with floor-to-ceiling glass walls 1,000 feet above the Strip.”

The timing is perfect, too, according to the post, because “Luxor’s pyramid and Excalibur’s castle were deemed ‘architecturally outdated’ and ‘inefficient for modern tourism.’”

Tall Tale

Boding surprisingly well for the future of humanity, most of the 340 comments left below the announcement recognized its fraudulence.

Some noticed the list of supposed amenities growing more and more preposterous with every bullet point, until it climaxed in “a 7-acre rooftop lagoon with floating cabanas, an indoor rainforest, and a Michelin-starred underwater restaurant.”

Others objected that a 1,000-foot structure would never get FAA approval so close to the airport, that the Excalibur and Luxor couldn’t already be undergoing demolition without news headlines having screamed about it for months, and/or that no legitimate architectural rendering in history has ever depicted a proposed new building in the same illustration as the implosion of the buildings that would make room for it.

But we seriously wonder how many commenters would have been so on the ball if this “news story” hadn’t been posted on April 1.

Foolish Custom

The April Fool’s Day prank is a custom that has seriously outlived its charm. Doesn’t our internet world struggle enough with deception, scams, and bad-faith actors exploiting trust for profit on the 364 days every year that aren’t April 1?

Of course, Las Vegas Parent Zone’s “prank” continues to gather clicks and spread misinformation more than a month after April 1. And others have joined in.

While it’s possible to accuse the YouTube channel for TotalVegasBuffets.com merely of cluelessness, we suspect something more inexcusable was behind the clip below. Uploaded on April 12, it features AI renderings of the Halo resort that weren’t in the original Facebook post. These renderings resemble neither the building from the Facebook post nor even one another.




This suggests that this channel knowingly spread the hoax, adding its own AI-generated imagery, just for the views (around 2,500 so far, impressive for a channel with only 26 subscribers, and about 2,433 more views than its previous podcast received).

We also suspect AI of generating the slick voices of the unidentified man and woman heard on the podcast and supposedly depicted in the video’s static image. (Check out the channel’s debut podcast from February, in which the real owner of the Total Vegas Buffets website provides an introduction before the same slick male and female voices begin speaking — again without identifying themselves.)

On a probably related note, TotalVegasBuffets.com is for sale, according to an ad that pops up when you visit it, suggesting that its owner has given up after about nine years of attempting to make a bigger success of it.

This illustration of the Halo Resort & Sky Casino was rendered by AI for a deceptive YouTube video. (Image: YouTube/@TotalVegas Buffets)

And why wouldn’t he peddle in deception on social media when there is no downside offsetting its financial upside? Why wouldn’t anyone?

YouTube and Meta (Facebook and Instagram) will only remove misinformation related to health, voter interference, falsely claimed election victories, or denial of major violent events such as the Holocaust. And X will allow any misinformation shared by any user.

Ironically, TikTok — the only leading platform that the US seeks to ban — has the most robust misinformation policy. It prohibits everything that Meta and YouTube do and adds climate misinformation, conspiracy theories, and any misattributed content.

But even its policy allows users to lie about anything else they want to.

MGM’s Plans for Excalibur

Eventually, the Halo hoax made its way to our friends at the vastly more trustworthy Las Vegas Advisor (LVA) website. They spotlighted it in their May 1 “Question of the Day” feature. In their reply to an employee of a general contractor asking about the new resort development, LVA actually broke some scoop that was news to us…

Not only have we never heard a peep out of MGM Resorts that it intends to replace Luxor and Excalibur, but the company actually has a tentative plan for a possible new hotel tower on Excalibur’s surplus land, currently occupied by surface parking.”

According to LVA, the new Excalibur tower will serve the increased demand for rooms created by the new Athletics baseball stadium across the street.

That’s if the stadium isn’t also a hoax.

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