How Saudi Arabia shaped Silicon Valley

Elon Musk. Donald Trump. Bill Gates. Sam Altman. Larry Ellison. Alex Karp. Jared Kushner. Mr. Beast. Jeffrey Epstein… Those are just a few of the people who have been friendly with, and often done business with, Saudi Arabia over the last decade. Today on the show: how one of the world’s most authoritarian regimes became one of Silicon Valley’s biggest investors – and what that’s meant for the rest of us. To access bonus episodes and listen to Throughline sponsor-free, subscribe to Throughline+ via Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org/throughline. See pcm.adswizz.com https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences. NPR Privacy Policy https://www.npr.org/about-npr/179878450/privacy-policy

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:24Rund Abdelfatah?

  November 4th, 2017.

• 0:28Rund Abdelfatah?

  The phone rings at around 4:00 in the morning. A Saudi prince named Al-Walid bin Talal answers.

• 0:35Speaker 02

  Come right away.

• 0:36Rund Abdelfatah?

  A voice commands. Al-Walid bin Talal is a billionaire, a business partner of Bill Gates, a stakeholder in Apple and Twitter, a guy not used to taking orders. But his uncle is the king of Saudi Arabia, and he's told he wants to see him right away. So he gets in his car and drives to the royal court, where another car pulls up. Prince Al-Walid is told to get in.

• 1:04Rund Abdelfatah?

  His driver, his guards, and his assistant are put in a different car. There's no time to grab his phone, and Prince Al-Walid finds himself completely alone.

• 1:15Speaker 03

  It's a long drive up, almost like an official kind of road. Heavy security on the outside and walls around it.

• 1:22Rund Abdelfatah?

  Perfectly manicured palm trees line the road. As the sun begins to rise, Prince Al-Walid sees an extravagant mansion with towering columns and rows of countless windows in the distance. This is the Ritz-Carlton Riyadh.

• 1:38Speaker 03

  It's a huge fancy hotel, like visiting a French palace or something like that.

• 1:43Speaker 04

  The car comes to a stop outside the grand entrance of the Ritz, and Prince Al-Walid is ushered into the lobby.

• 1:50Speaker 03

  The lobby is luxurious, with really beautiful polished marble floors and this traditional type of instance called oud that's always burning in the lobby.

• 2:00Speaker 04

  But something feels different about it, weirdly empty. He's escorted to the elevator, told he'll be staying in a suite, and left to wait.

• 2:12Speaker 04

  With nothing else to do, he turns on the TV. Breaking news fills the screen.

• 2:20Speaker 04

  Dozens of Saudi businessmen and royal family members are being arrested on suspicion of corruption and rounded up somewhere. Then it begins to dawn on Prince Al-Walid that he is one of those people.

• 2:33Rund Abdelfatah?

  His captors have removed the locks on the doors, removed the curtains.

• 2:39Speaker 03

  Locked the windows.

• 2:40Rund Abdelfatah?

  Dismantled the shower doors.

• 2:42Speaker 03

  So nobody could hurt themselves.

• 2:43Rund Abdelfatah?

  Overnight, the Ritz had been converted into a makeshift prison.

• 2:47Speaker 04

  By morning, Prince Al-Walid is locked in alongside hundreds of other wealthy Saudis.

• 2:54Rund Abdelfatah?

  Guards walk the hallways 24/7, manning the exits. Hotel staff are directed to cancel upcoming reservations.

• 3:02Speaker 03

  And then what happened to these people was they underwent a series of sort of interrogations.

• 3:08Rund Abdelfatah?

  To suss out how much of each prisoner's wealth had been gained through corruption.

• 3:12Speaker 03

  Either they kind of fell in line and they could go home right away, or they could stay and try to fight. But ultimately, the way you got out of trouble is you just signed over huge amounts of wealth back to the state.

• 3:24Speaker 04

  The Ritz was closed off to visitors for three months while this was going on.

• 3:28Rund Abdelfatah?

  And then, one day, as quickly as it had transformed into a prison, it went back to being a five-star hotel. Business as usual.

• 3:39Speaker 03

  It's one of the craziest events that I've ever heard about in my lifetime.

• 3:45Speaker 04

  Some called it "The Shakedown," spelled S-A-H-E-I-K, a pun on the title for an Arab leader or chief.

• 3:53Speaker 03

  I mean, there was many, many hundreds of billions of dollars in this hotel, of people worth that much money.

• 3:59Rund Abdelfatah?

  And it was no secret who was behind it all. The kingdom's de facto ruler, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who the world would come to know as MBS.

• 4:10Speaker 04

  For him, this wasn't just a purge. It was a pivot to a new future. By the time the chandeliers were polished and the curtains pressed, he had reportedly secured upwards of $100 billion for the Saudi state.

• 4:25Rund Abdelfatah?

  Money that would help the Crown Prince transform how the US does business.

• 4:31Speaker 05

  Bezos is just one of a small army of tech titans falling over themselves to do business with the Saudis and hoover up their cash.

• 4:38Rund Abdelfatah?

  Elon Musk's XAI gets $3 billion investment from Saudi-backed AI firm.

• 4:43Speaker 06

  The biggest YouTuber in the world, Mr. Beast.

• 4:45Speaker 07

  was in Riyadh this week to launch Beastland. Jared Kushner appears to have cashed in on his time in the White House with a $2 billion investment.

• 4:53Speaker 06

  Kushner, with the help from Saudi Arabia, took video game giant Electronic Arts Private in the largest leveraged buyout ever.

• 5:00Speaker 02

  A new Trump Tower in Saudi Arabia in a cryptocurrency venture. Saudi Arabia is helping the Ellison family.

• 5:06Speaker 06

  The Ellison's, who are major Trump supporters.

• 5:08Speaker 02

  Launch a hostile takeover of Warner Brothers in their bid to control US media. Either Imam Naeif or so, so if I'm an alias, so I can 10 for so, 100 for so, 1000 for so, 10,000 for so.

• 5:22Rund Abdelfatah?

  Elon Musk, Donald Trump, Bill Gates, Sam Altman, Larry Ellison, Alex Karp, Jared Kushner, Mr. Beast, Jeffrey Epstein. Those are just a few of the people who have been friendly with and often done business with Saudi Arabia over the last decade.

• 5:41Speaker 04

  Many of them are Silicon Valley titans, people whose technologies have fundamentally changed how we live. Well before the AI race got going, billions of Saudi dollars were already reshaping the US economy.

• 5:55Rund Abdelfatah?

  And now, many of those tech companies are vulnerable, as Iran targets their infrastructure in Saudi Arabia and other Gulf countries in the ongoing war. I'm Randa Abdel Fattah.

• 6:08Speaker 04

  I'm Ramtin Arablouei.

• 6:10Rund Abdelfatah?

  On this episode of Throughline from NPR, we follow the money trail, tracing how one of the most authoritarian regimes in the world became one of the biggest investors in American tech, a business partner to the American president, and how that's shaping the future for all of us.

• 6:34Speaker 06

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• 6:45Speaker 00

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• 7:07Speaker 00

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• 7:32Speaker 06

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• 7:58Rund Abdelfatah?

  Part one, the startup prince.

• 8:02Speaker 03

  Mohammed bin Salman is like your classic millennial.

• 8:06Rund Abdelfatah?

  This is journalist Bradley Hope. He's the co-author of the book Blood and Oil: Mohammed bin Salman's Ruthless Quest for Global Power.

• 8:15Speaker 03

  Born in 1985, he grew up with technology. He loves it. Spent a lot of time playing video games, had an absolute fascination with the great entrepreneurs of Silicon Valley. He created a manga company at one point because he was really interested in Japanese manga. He really had no conception whatsoever of one day becoming the ruler of Saudi Arabia.

• 8:40Rund Abdelfatah?

  So, how did this manga-loving tech geek become the guy who would stage the shakedown at the Ritz? The answer is a saga of power and intrigue that could pass for an episode of Game of Thrones or Succession.

• 8:55Speaker 04

  For most of its history, the region we now call Saudi Arabia was pretty sparsely populated with nomadic tribes. It's the desert, so it's not easy to find food and water. And its main claim to fame was as the home of the holy cities of Mecca and Medina.

• 9:12Speaker 03

  It's the center of Islam for the world.

• 9:14Speaker 04

  But in the early 1900s, things began to change.

• 9:20Speaker 03

  Mohammed bin Salman's grandfather, who is known in the West as Ibn Saud, took over the country through a kind of daring invasion.

• 9:30Speaker 04

  There was a lot of jockeying for power happening among the tribes of the region. Ibn Saud wanted to reclaim the glory and ancestral lands of the House of Saud and unify the Arabian Peninsula. He staged a two-pronged attack, a military campaign, and a strategic alliance with the ultra-conservative Wahhabists to form the modern nation of Saudi Arabia. Ibn Saud would be its first king.

• 9:58Speaker 03

  It's an absolute monarchy, where all law originates from the decision of the monarch. And then subsequently, all further kings were actually his sons.

• 10:08Rund Abdelfatah?

  Ibn Saud had over 100 kids with 22 wives, give or take. So we're talking a lot of sons. And MBS's father, Salman, is one of them.

• 10:19Speaker 04

  This new nation in the middle of the desert didn't seem to have a lot going for it. But American representatives from the Standard Oil Company of California believed there was oil. Ibn Saud cut a deal. They created what would become known as the Arabian American Oil Company, or ARAMCO. And the search began. They found oil, but not in commercial quantities. It was not encouraging. They drilled again.

• 10:49Speaker 03

  No luck. And again, still failure. And then it happened. They did find a huge amount of oil.

• 10:59Speaker 04

  Over the next few decades, Aramco grew into the most profitable company on the planet. And the Al Saud family would have a seat at the most important tables in the world, helping to shape the global economy. They lived extravagantly in massive palaces. Oil had given them a ticket to a life of luxury beyond what most of us can even imagine.

• 11:22Speaker 05

  It was my father's cousins who loaded the oil in these tankers. We know what that oil is worth. This is our land. But we did not see as kids the money that's coming through.

• 11:36Rund Abdelfatah?

  This is Ali Al Ahmed. He's a Saudi journalist and dissident who's been living in the US for the last 30 years. Growing up in Saudi Arabia in the 1960s and 70s, oil shaped everything about his life. He still remembers the view from the roof of his family's home.

• 11:53Speaker 05

  I can see the port, the main oil port.

• 11:57Rund Abdelfatah?

  He lived in a city on the coast of the Persian Gulf.

• 11:59Speaker 05

  An ancient city that goes back thousands of years.

• 12:03Rund Abdelfatah?

  Ali says all the best resources in his city were funneled 250 miles back to Riyadh, the country's capital, in the center of the country where the royal family lived.

• 12:13Speaker 05

  Riyadh is drinking fresh water and getting the best electric power. We didn't have any paved roads in the city.

• 12:23Rund Abdelfatah?

  But people couldn't make their needs known. In an absolute monarchy, you don't have free speech. News media and TV were severely restricted, and many books were banned. Ali says the government would conduct raids searching for contraband.

• 12:39Speaker 05

  We were so worried about these raids. We had to bury our books, non-political books.

• 12:45Rund Abdelfatah?

  One of Ali's favorite banned books was about the Bermuda Triangle.

• 12:49Speaker 05

  As a child, I remember this big sign on the highway. This is with the government. It says,

• 13:01Speaker 05

  Dear citizen, do not think. We will think for you.

• 13:11Rund Abdelfatah?

  In 1981, when Ali was 14 years old, he found himself in the crosshairs of the Saudi state while on vacation with his family in neighboring Qatar.

• 13:20Speaker 05

  They had an alert to track some activists that were coming from Iran, I think. And they arrested us in Daohha, Qatar.

• 13:28Rund Abdelfatah?

  So they didn't tell you what the charges were, anything? They just picked you up?

• 13:31Speaker 05

  No, nothing. You know, you are from a population that they don't like. You must be guilty.

• 13:37Rund Abdelfatah?

  It was the middle of Ramadan, the month of fasting for Muslims.

• 13:41Speaker 05

  July, my god, it was so hot.

• 13:44Rund Abdelfatah?

  He and his family members were put on a bus.

• 13:46Speaker 05

  Like, school bus with no AC.

• 13:49Rund Abdelfatah?

  With other detainees.

• 13:50Speaker 05

  And the thing was packed. We had kids. And people just started throwing up.

• 13:57Rund Abdelfatah?

  When they finally crossed into Saudi territory and the bus came to a stop outside a prison.

• 14:02Speaker 05

  They had to drag me from the bus.

• 14:05Rund Abdelfatah?

  You resisted?

• 14:05Speaker 05

  Resisted. So they put chains on my hand and my legs. And I remember reading "Made in California, USA."

• 14:16Speaker 05

  And then we were separated in different cells.

• 14:20Rund Abdelfatah?

  Ali was then interrogated.

• 14:22Speaker 05

  This investigator, he said, "What did you do?" I said, "I'm supposed to ask you that?"

• 14:27Rund Abdelfatah?

  And there's no right to remain silent or anything like that?

• 14:30Speaker 05

  No, no, no. No, there is nothing like... There is torture, and the people were crawling. Later, I found that one kid, 17-year-old, he died in the same area I was.

• 14:45Rund Abdelfatah?

  After a few weeks, Ali and his family were released. His dad was able to pull some strings to get them out.

• 14:59Speaker 04

  Ali left Saudi Arabia for good in the 1990s, relocating to the United States. Around that time, a young MBS was busy playing video games and surfing the newly minted World Wide Web. No plans for the throne on the horizon.

• 15:14Speaker 03

  His father was still number three on a list. There was two other older brothers before him.

• 15:20Speaker 04

  And even if his father somehow ended up as king, MBS wasn't the logical successor. His mom was the third wife and he had several older half brothers.

• 15:30Speaker 03

  It was kind of unimaginable.

• 15:32Speaker 04

  Plus, the royal family had ballooned. Ibn Saoud's many kids had many kids. We're talking thousands. Different branches of the family controlled different parts of the government, and it was easy to get lost in the shuffle. MBS knew he had to find a way to stand out. So unlike his older half brothers, who spent a lot of time abroad.

• 15:53Speaker 03

  They almost sound like posh British people.

• 15:55Speaker 04

  MBS decided to stay in Saudi Arabia.

• 15:59Speaker 03

  He went to university in Saudi Arabia. His English wasn't even that great for a long time.

• 16:04Speaker 04

  He wanted to be close to his father Salman.

• 16:07Speaker 03

  He was kind of the family disciplinarian, handling these different families disputes. So he had files on everybody.

• 16:14Speaker 04

  All that intel his father had went into a kind of burn book, which MBS had access to and which he would later use to consolidate power.

• 16:31Rund Abdelfatah?

  And then, in less than a year, MBS's fortunes changed dramatically.

• 16:38Rund Abdelfatah?

  Between October 2011 and June 2012, two of MBS's uncles died. The older brothers in line for the throne before his father. With their deaths.

• 16:49Speaker 03

  His father became essentially the guaranteed second in line to be the king.

• 16:54Rund Abdelfatah?

  Suddenly, MBS had a clear path to power. But there were others in the royal family vying for that spot. And MBS knew he had to move fast.

• 17:04Speaker 03

  It was like almost Shakespearean, people conniving against Salman coming into power.

• 17:10Rund Abdelfatah?

  MBS put together a team of people he trusted.

• 17:13Speaker 03

  And they were using everything they could, even what you might consider espionage techniques, to understand what everyone else is doing and what are the different ploys being planned against his father. MBS just became a round-the-clock tactician.

• 17:26Rund Abdelfatah?

  Clearing the path for his father to take the throne and proving himself indispensable.

• 17:31Speaker 03

  He switched gears from the young, kind of business-oriented guy into this kind of king in the waiting.

• 17:41Speaker 04

  In early 2015, word began to spread that the sitting king of Saudi Arabia, King Abdullah, was very sick.

• 17:49Speaker 07

  MBS actually went to King Abdullah with his father in the hospital, and King Abdullah was on respirator. He was basically dead.

• 17:57Speaker 04

  Something those closest to him were trying to conceal for as long as possible.

• 18:02Speaker 07

  And MBS barged into the room. The secretary of the king was there to make sure nobody sees the king on the respirator. MBS slapped him across the face. That slap led to the announcement of King Abdullah being dead. Late word from overseas tonight of the passing of a major figure in the Middle East.

• 18:24Speaker 06

  King Abdullah died at the age of 90. King Abdullah's half-brother Salman immediately succeeded him.

• 18:31Speaker 03

  Salman himself was getting up there in age.

• 18:34Speaker 04

  So when he took the throne, MBS would be pulling the strings.

• 18:39Speaker 07

  His cousin told me, "He is like a bull in a china shop."

• 18:43Speaker 03

  What he says goes, no matter what anybody else says.

• 18:50Rund Abdelfatah?

  Send in the F-15s. That's the order MBS gave to a room of stunned Saudi generals, just eight weeks after his father Salman took the throne. Almost overnight, MBS had consolidated control over the kingdom's finances and military. He installed a close ally as head of a Ramco. Halal. And he launched a deadly bombing campaign in Yemen.

• 19:19Rund Abdelfatah?

  American-made bombs. The Obama administration sold him.

• 19:25Rund Abdelfatah?

  MBS hoped he could quickly stomp out the Houthi rebels there, who were backed by Saudi Arabia's longtime rival, Iran.

• 19:33Speaker 03

  He's saying, "This will be over in a couple of months." Then it becomes a, you know, decades-long problem, and nobody knows that better than America.

• 19:42Rund Abdelfatah?

  As bombs were falling in Yemen and civilians dying, MBS turned his attention to his most ambitious project, the thing he saw as the key ingredient to Saudi Arabia's future:

• 19:56Rund Abdelfatah?

  winning over Silicon Valley.

• 19:59Speaker 07

  The way things get done in the world are through a combination of focus and personal connection. The third factor...

• 20:05Speaker 04

  His self-belief. Ever since he was a video game-loving kid, MBS had been obsessed with tech. And he'd always kept one eye on the US. Now, he had the power to disrupt things in that lofty, think-big style of tech CEOs like Sam Altman. He called his plan Vision 2030. It centered around Saudi Arabia's Sovereign Wealth Fund, the Public Investment Fund, or PIF, a rainy-day stockpile worth many billions of dollars. His plan involved converting the PIF into a Silicon Valley super-engine.

• 20:40Speaker 03

  The entire philosophy was they would use this money as an accelerant to something that was already starting to show signs of growth. And they would just pour money onto it in the hopes that it would ignite into a monopoly or something like that.

• 20:54Rund Abdelfatah?

  MBS had gotten the idea from his cousin, Prince Al-Walid bin Talal. They'd actually pitched the idea together, Shark Tank-style, when King Abdullah was still alive. This was years before the Ritz kidnapping. Their idea went nowhere. The Al Sauds weren't exactly known for taking risks, which in the 21st century was becoming more and more of a problem.

• 21:17Speaker 03

  Saudi Arabia was in a bit of a crisis. They were conservative economically. They were conservative politically.

• 21:23Rund Abdelfatah?

  In the age of internet and social media.

• 21:25Speaker 03

  They were conservative socially.

• 21:27Rund Abdelfatah?

  Women couldn't drive and had strict dress codes. Movie theaters were outlawed.

• 21:31Speaker 03

  And there's just going to be a problem in the future.

• 21:34Rund Abdelfatah?

  MBS wanted the country to change, on his terms, which frustrated Prince Al-Walid bin Talal, who had his own vision for how things should go.

• 21:44Speaker 03

  He's the kind of person that drinks coffee out of a mug with his own face on it.

• 21:47Rund Abdelfatah?

  He was the second-biggest investor in Twitter, owning more stock than even Jack Dorsey, its then-CEO. And he had shares in Rupert Murdoch's companies, Fox and News Corp.

• 21:58Speaker 04

  Even so, MBS cut Prince Al-Walid out of his future plans and started meeting with a Japanese billionaire tech investor named Masayoshi Son. Together, in 2016, they started taking Silicon Valley by storm.

• 22:16Speaker 04

  Has turned to the Middle East for its biggest investment ever.

• 22:19Speaker 03

  The Uber deal wasn't particularly well structured or valued.

• 22:22Speaker 04

  Company announcing a $3.5 billion raise from Saudi Arabia's public investment fund. An unprecedented amount of money for a single investment.

• 22:30Speaker 03

  It was just saying, we've arrived. This is the new Saudi era.

• 22:38Speaker 04

  Coming up, Saudi Arabia goes on a spending spree.

• 22:51Speaker 05

  Hi, this is Justin Whitlow from Lester, North Carolina, and you are listening to Three Line.

• 22:57Speaker 06

  Stay tuned for the following announcements and messages from our sponsors. This episode's sponsor is HubSpot, which offers the following message. What if instead of updating your CRM, your CRM updated you? No catching up on manual edits, no more guesswork. HubSpot's self-updating CRM keeps your customer context current and helps you understand what to do next. So, marketing builds more demand, sales wins more deals, and customers keep coming back. Learn more at hubspot.com.

• 23:27Speaker 07

  Midlife brings a lot of changes. Your Turn with Alison Aubrey is a new podcast to help you navigate the twists and turns. From health and relationships to creativity and purpose, we can help steer your next chapter with Your Turn with Alison Aubrey. Find it on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 23:49Speaker 07

  This week on Here and Now Anytime, in the closing days of the midterm elections, we're in Iowa and Arizona, two states where independent voters will decide who controls Congress for the next two years. Even though we're in a red district, we will get out the Democratic and independent vote. We will. Here and Now Anytime. Listen on the NPR app or anywhere you listen to podcasts.

• 24:15Rund Abdelfatah?

  Part two: Friends in high places.

• 24:20Rund Abdelfatah?

  Silicon Valley, December 2015. An FBI agent walks into Twitter headquarters with a shocking report. The agency believes there's a spy ring inside the company.

• 24:35Rund Abdelfatah?

  Two Saudi citizens and one Lebanese-American were being paid by the Saudi government to spy on Saudis inside the country and abroad. Two of the men were Twitter employees. They'd managed to hack thousands of Twitter accounts.

• 24:50Speaker 06

  And had helped unmask Saudi Twitter users, as in find their IP addresses, their phone numbers, help discover where they live, personal information, and pass that information along to Saudi authorities.

• 25:04Rund Abdelfatah?

  This is journalist Jacob Silverman, author of the book Gilded Rage: Elon Musk and the Radicalization of Silicon Valley.

• 25:12Speaker 06

  I've talked to Saudi exiles who live in the US who believe that their family members in Saudi Arabia were unmasked and arrested because of this process.

• 25:32Speaker 04

  Five years earlier, in December 2010, Twitter had helped ignite the Arab Spring. The story of a Tunisian fruit vendor named Mohamed Bouazizi went viral after lighting himself on fire in protest. And across the Middle East, people were coordinating, protesting, resisting, using Twitter to amplify their voices. Many young Saudis logged into those conversations.

• 25:57Speaker 06

  For a while, Saudi Arabia was one of the biggest markets, and certainly the biggest market in the Middle East, for Twitter.

• 26:02Speaker 04

  It was a digital public square where free thought was allowed, even if their physical reality remained unchanged.

• 26:10Speaker 06

  At the time, a lot of these tech companies saw their technologies, and especially social media, as inherently liberatory, as these were emancipatory technologies. The Arab Spring, of course, did not take off in Saudi Arabia because it's a very repressive country.

• 26:27Speaker 04

  By 2015, Saudi Prince Al-Walid bin Talal was a major investor in Twitter. In 2018, the Arabic-language Twitter account of Saudi journalist and dissident Ali Al-Ahmad was suspended. He'd also been a target of the spy ring.

• 26:43Speaker 03

  The Saudi government has one of the largest media empire in the world. They have a policy of expanding their media empire to control public opinion.

• 26:58Speaker 04

  Now, they were paying the price.

• 27:01Speaker 03

  People are spending years in prison, decades in prison because of this action.

• 27:05Speaker 04

  One of the men who was allegedly unmasked by the spy ring was recently executed.

• 27:11Speaker 06

  The full extent of the damage isn't quite known, and that may be happening much more widely than just Twitter.

• 27:17Rund Abdelfatah?

  The two Saudi spies managed to flee the US without consequences and are believed to be living in Saudi Arabia. The Lebanese-American spy stood trial in a US federal court and was sentenced to three and a half years in prison. That indictment is how we learned a lot of these details. But one name omitted from the record was the head of the spy ring back in Saudi Arabia.

• 27:41Speaker 03

  They took away his name, but you know, somebody leaked it, and it was pretty obvious.

• 27:47Rund Abdelfatah?

  Badir Al Asaqir, a close advisor of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, known widely as MBS, who runs his private foundation.

• 27:57Speaker 06

  I think one mistake that the tech industry made, that Silicon Valley made, was it went into all these foreign markets without really thinking about how can this stuff be used in more malevolent ways for surveillance, for oppression, for monitoring those same dissidents and activists.

• 28:14Rund Abdelfatah?

  In June 2016, six months after the FBI showed up at Twitter headquarters, Jack Dorsey and MBS met in the US. They took photos together, smiling and shaking hands. The photos were posted to Twitter by none other than Badir Al Asaqir, the alleged head of the spy ring.

• 28:36Speaker 06

  To my knowledge, Jack Dorsey never commented on any of this.

• 28:39Speaker 04

  This was all happening right around the time that massive unprecedented Uber deal went through. And a lot of CEOs in Silicon Valley were starting to wonder if the Saudis were the key to their futures, too. MBS might be a dictator, but he had a lot of money and was clearly willing to invest.

• 28:58Speaker 03

  There's these two worlds of MBS. There's the secret paranoid hidden world where he's trying to defend himself against perceived threats. And then at the same time, there's this sort of public version, which is the transformative, charming changemaker prince who is going to change Saudi Arabia forever.

• 29:14Speaker 04

  Because alongside his authoritarian moves, MBS was starting to liberalize Saudi Arabia in ways that appealed to Westerners. Reopening movie theaters, allowing mixed gender gatherings, giving women the right to drive, and sidelining the religious police, who had strictly controlled what women wore.

• 29:33Rund Abdelfatah?

  The question was, could that paranoid hidden world and his public image as a changemaker coexist forever? Over the following year, each season brought that question closer and closer to a tipping point.

• 29:49Speaker 04

  Spring 2017.

• 29:53Rund Abdelfatah?

  Tomorrow, as you know, I'm going to Saudi Arabia. Just a few months into his first term, President Trump surprised everyone when he announced his first overseas trip as president.

• 30:05Speaker 03

  Usually, in the traditions of the White House, you first visit your closest allies. You know, it might be Canada or the UK. And then this was like Saudi Arabia, which was culturally seemed at the time to be very far, also the home of most of the 9/11 attackers.

• 30:20Rund Abdelfatah?

  To a lot of people at the time, it seemed like a strange choice. But behind the scenes...

• 30:26Speaker 03

  The UAE ambassador to Washington DC started putting Mohammed bin Salman forward as this amazing changemaker in the Middle East, and he could really have huge impacts on the world. That made MBS very attractive to the...

• 30:41Speaker 03

  Trump administration to be seen like they were helping change something or having an impact.

• 30:46Rund Abdelfatah?

  MBS rolled out the red carpet for Trump at the Ritz Carlton Riyadh.

• 30:51Speaker 03

  I stand before you as a representative of the American people to deliver a message of friendship and hope and love.

• 31:03Speaker 03

  The MBS team knew exactly what Trump needed. Trump wanted a number with a lot of zeros at the end of it because it's all about announcing big deals and stuff like that. This landmark agreement includes the announcement of a $110 billion Saudi-funded defense purchase. Silicon Valley meets like New York City ostentatiousness.

• 31:27Speaker 04

  But inside Saudi Arabia, MBS would soon ramp up a campaign of political repression.

• 31:34Speaker 06

  People were being stopped in the streets and their phones were being checked by police.

• 31:38Speaker 04

  Activists who had led the push for women to drive were arrested. So were dissenting clerics. No protest of any kind would be tolerated.

• 31:46Rund Abdelfatah?

  The Saudi workforce continued to rely on the Kefala system, a system critics have called "modern day slavery," in which migrant workers are completely at the mercy of their employers.

• 31:58Speaker 04

  And there were allegations of war crimes in Yemen, where MBS was continuing his military campaign with weapons support from the US.

• 32:08Rund Abdelfatah?

  But none of this seemed likely to change after this historic first trip President Trump took to Saudi Arabia, signaling that he was on board with MBS's vision for the future, a green light to Silicon Valley to go all in with MBS.

• 32:23Speaker 06

  I think that there was a definite change once Trump came into power and more of an authoritarian slide in Silicon Valley. But to me, that was something that was already there and already happening independent of Trump.

• 32:38Speaker 04

  Fall 2017.

• 32:43Speaker 03

  This was a huge coming out introducing Saudi Arabia.

• 32:46Rund Abdelfatah?

  Five months after MBS put on a show for Trump at the Ritz, he upped the ante, putting together a three-day economic summit at the Ritz called the Future Investment Initiative, but informally marketed to the world. Davos of the desert.

• 33:02Speaker 05

  Technology.

• 33:05Speaker 05

  New frontiers. Unleashing innovative ideas.

• 33:12Speaker 05

  Celebrating the visionary among us.

• 33:16Speaker 03

  I was at the Wall Street Journal, so I came as a journalist to cover the conference. I mean, it was a huge conference. I was a member walking through the Ritz and there was Tony Blair there, all the CEOs of major companies. A star-studded kind of event.

• 33:33Speaker 03

  So then we all went back to wherever we lived. A few weeks later, suddenly there was this news that came out in this very unofficial way.

• 33:43Speaker 03

  Breaking news out of Saudi Arabia. Palace intrigue to the nth degree.

• 33:47Speaker 06

  We're seeing a truly historic upheaval unfold right now. A royal purge in Saudi Arabia. Founding up several high-profile people.

• 33:55Speaker 04

  All these bold moves MBS was making in Yemen, in Silicon Valley, within Saudi itself, had made a lot of the other royals mad.

• 34:04Speaker 03

  And so he really had to sleep with one eye open at that time.

• 34:09Speaker 04

  As had become his MO by this point, he decided to try something pretty extreme to stifle dissent.

• 34:16Rund Abdelfatah?

  Cue the shakedown.

• 34:19Speaker 05

  There has been a lot of news this week out of Saudi Arabia, which is basically America's kooky rich uncle who occasionally beheads people.

• 34:26Speaker 04

  This time, the American news media did pay attention. Of course, it helped that it was a riveting story. Even Jeffrey Epstein, who considered MBS a close friend, was apparently keeping a close eye on what was happening at the Ritz. MBS's name is all over the Epstein files, by the way.

• 34:44Speaker 05

  So why do this purge?

• 34:45Rund Abdelfatah?

  Anyway, American watchers were confused. Wasn't this the guy bringing radical reform to Saudi Arabia?

• 34:52Speaker 02

  You know, that's the big question. They say it's all about corruption. I really don't believe that.

• 34:57Rund Abdelfatah?

  In one Washington Post interview, MBS explained his actions this way. Quote, "You have a body that has cancer everywhere. The cancer of corruption. You need to have chemo. The shock of chemo. Where the cancer will eat the body."

• 35:13Speaker 03

  This event of the Ritz created some cracks in the surface, but it didn't break.

• 35:22Speaker 04

  Spring 2018.

• 35:28Speaker 06

  Riyadh's Ritz Carlton Hotel has finally reopened more than three months after it was converted into a gilded prison.

• 35:37Speaker 04

  Just a month after the Ritz reopened to the public as a hotel, MBS took all that money he'd seized and went on a whistle-stop tour through the US.

• 35:48Speaker 06

  And he gets a very warm welcome.

• 35:50Speaker 04

  He meets with President Trump in Washington, Wall Street bankers in New York, and tech CEOs in Silicon Valley, looking to make deals.

• 36:00Speaker 06

  You would think that maybe US businessmen and oligarchs would wonder, hey, didn't this guy just imprison a bunch of our Saudi colleagues? But that didn't seem to bother anyone.

• 36:11Speaker 03

  He had dinner at Bill Gates' house.

• 36:13Speaker 06

  There are pictures from that visit of MBS standing with a whole bunch of top Silicon Valley venture capitalists and CEOs.

• 36:23Speaker 04

  There seemed to be no red line he could cross that would keep Americans from doing business with him.

• 36:30Rund Abdelfatah?

  And then,

• 36:33Rund Abdelfatah?

  fall 2018.

• 36:36Rund Abdelfatah?

  Jamal Chojogji walked into a consulate in Istanbul.

• 36:42Rund Abdelfatah?

  That's coming up.

• 36:48Speaker 06

  My name is Deveria Sahil, and I'm calling from London, United Kingdom. You're listening to Throughline from NPR. Stay tuned for the following announcements and messages from our sponsors. This episode's sponsor is HubSpot, which offers the following message: What if instead of updating your CRM, your CRM updated you? No catching up on manual edits, no more guesswork. HubSpot's self-updating CRM keeps your customer context current and helps you understand what to do next. So, marketing builds more demand, sales wins more deals, and customers keep coming back. Learn more at hubspot.com.

• 37:24Speaker 05

  Oh, Kevin, it feels good to be back. It sure does, Casey, and what a time. The world is talking about AI and what's going on in Silicon Valley, and we are here with a new show to tell you all about it. That's right, Kevin. On our new show, Machine Gods, twice a week, we'll be bringing you the biggest news in tech and bring you unmatched access to the real titans of this industry. You can find Machine Gods from NPR on the NPR Or wherever you get your podcasts. On the latest episode of Sources and Methods, in Israel this week, an election with no clear winner. Next week, in the US, an election that could shift the balance of power in Washington. And in both countries, a defining issue for voters, the war in Iran. We look at where things could be headed in that conflict.

• 38:08Speaker 05

  Listen this week to Sources and Methods, the national security podcast from NPR.

• 38:13Rund Abdelfatah?

  Part three, The Uncanny Valley.

• 38:21Rund Abdelfatah?

  Where is Jamal Hashoji?

• 38:24Speaker 05

  No signs of a missing Saudi journalist. The search is on for clues. Walked into the Saudi Arabian embassy. Never seen coming out. He hasn't been seen since. Disappeared.

• 38:38Speaker 04

  At 1:15 PM on October 2, 2018, Jamal Hashoji, known to Americans mostly through his opinion column for The Washington Post, entered the Saudi consulate in Istanbul. He never came out.

• 38:57Speaker 03

  People describe him often as a journalist, right? But it's a very underdeveloped way to describe him.

• 39:04Speaker 03

  He was something that we can't really connect with. There's no equivalent in American life. He was on the payroll of the royal family of Saudi Arabia. His role was to be almost propagandistic at times.

• 39:16Speaker 04

  After the Arab Spring broke out in 2010, Hashoji began speaking out more against the Saudi regime and its autocratic policies, which landed him in hot water when MBS took over.

• 39:28Speaker 03

  In the MBS era, there was only two sides. There's either 100% MBS or 0% MBS. And if you're 0% MBS, you're essentially the enemy of the state. And over time, it became more and more clear that he was not on the right side. If he was going to stay in Saudi Arabia, he would have to essentially disappear. He didn't really want that life for himself. So he essentially fled and escaped to America.

• 39:53Speaker 04

  It was summer 2017. Soon after, he began to write pieces for The Washington Post criticizing MBS. In one piece, he compared the shakedown at the Ritz to the Night of the Long Knives, Hitler's brutal 1934 purge and consolidation of power in which hundreds of people were killed.

• 40:15Speaker 03

  It seems to me likely that they knew quite a bit about what Jamal Hachyukji was doing and who he was talking to and who he was meeting with.

• 40:22Rund Abdelfatah?

  MBS had his people keeping tabs on Hachyukji.

• 40:25Speaker 03

  He had essentially built his own intelligence service that only answered to him. They were really aggressive, looking for who's out to get MBS, who's against him.

• 40:35Rund Abdelfatah?

  There are more arrests happening at home. Jacob Silverman says at one point, an exile in Canada accused MBS of sending hitmen to kill him. The Saudis were also accused of trying to hack Jeff Bezos's phone. Neither accusation was ever proven. What we do know is that Bezos owns the Washington Post, where Hachyukji worked. And a couple months later, Hachyukji disappeared.

• 41:02Speaker 04

  On the morning of October 2, 2018, Hachyukji headed to the Saudi consulate to pick up his marriage documents. He had recently become engaged. At 1:15 PM, he entered the consulate. What happened next is captured on tape. And a warning, some of the details are pretty graphic.

• 41:24Rund Abdelfatah?

  Only a few people have heard the actual tapes, but here's what they reveal. Inside the consulate, a team of 15 hitmen, Saudi security officers, were waiting for Hachyukji. One of them says, "Has the sacrificial animal arrived?" And they all laugh.

• 41:41Speaker 04

  When Hachyukji gets there, they approach him at reception and tell him there's a warrant out for his arrest, that he must return to Saudi Arabia.

• 41:50Rund Abdelfatah?

  At first, Hachyukji resists. Then his voice changes, growing more fearful. "Are you going to give me an injection?" he asks. "Yes," the hitmen respond.

• 42:02Speaker 04

  They grab Hachyukji. He's beaten and tortured before finally being strangled.

• 42:07Rund Abdelfatah?

  His last words are, "I can't breathe."

• 42:11Speaker 04

  One of the men, a forensic pathologist, then cuts up Hachyukji's body with a saw.

• 42:17Speaker 03

  And then somebody actually put on his clothes and walked around Istanbul, acting as if they were him.

• 42:23Rund Abdelfatah?

  To this day, authorities have never recovered his body.

• 42:28Speaker 04

  And this got the world's attention.

• 42:31Speaker 05

  The dictatorship that calls itself the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia insulted the world with its written explanation of how Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi was murdered inside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul.

• 42:48Speaker 06

  I think it certainly opened some Americans' eyes as to how brutal this regime could be and how aggressive MBS could be.

• 42:54Speaker 04

  And there were calls for accountability. Congresspeople drafted bills to stop US weapons funding to Saudi Arabia in its war in Yemen. A lot of businesspeople dropped out of Davos in the desert that year, the Saudi summit for the global financial elite. They reduce it to one person, as there's only one issue.

• 43:14Rund Abdelfatah?

  Oh, it's just one guy. No, it's not one guy.

• 43:18Rund Abdelfatah?

  Ali Al-Ahmed, a fellow Saudi dissident and journalist, knew Khashoggi personally. We have people who are much more important than Jamal Khashoggi, who were killed in Saudi Arabia. He says Khashoggi wasn't the first or last person the Saudi regime targeted. And even with the fallout from Khashoggi's murder, MBS...

• 43:39Speaker 03

  Didn't seem to break a sweat and like really, you know, savage himself over it. He just turned all of his focus inward, all of the investment, the public investment fund focus inward, and he just slowly, patiently rebuilt.

• 43:53Rund Abdelfatah?

  He pumped more money into Saudi Arabia's infrastructure and began clearing the way for a city of the future called Gnome.

• 44:01Speaker 06

  It's meant to be in the desert. It's a linear city that is clad between two mirrored walls. The original plan for it was supposed to be 170 kilometers.

• 44:10Rund Abdelfatah?

  Which, we should note, led to the displacement of around 20,000 Saudis.

• 44:15Speaker 06

  There have been other foreign artists who have performed in the Kingdom.

• 44:19Rund Abdelfatah?

  He began paying big bucks for American celebrities to come to Saudi Arabia.

• 44:24Speaker 06

  People like Mariah Carey and Enrique Iglesias and the Backstreet Boys.

• 44:28Rund Abdelfatah?

  And Saudi Arabia continued to make big deals with Silicon Valley, building an especially close relationship with Elon Musk. Documents show Elon Musk has raised more...

• 44:39Speaker 05

  More than $7 billion from investors, including a Saudi prince, to help finance his purchase of Twitter.

• 44:46Speaker 06

  They became regular investors in his companies.

• 44:49Rund Abdelfatah?

  And when the AI race started to heat up, Musk began depending even more on Saudi money to compete.

• 44:55Speaker 06

  Because these AI companies need to raise billions every few months in order to sustain the data center build out and the outlay of resources that is required.

• 45:05Speaker 04

  The heads of other AI companies traveled to Saudi Arabia to meet with MBS, too. OpenAI's Sam Altman, Palantir's Alex Karp.

• 45:14Speaker 06

  The tech industry has hardly wavered in kind of its loyalty and alignment with MBS.

• 45:20Speaker 04

  In the last few years, Silicon Valley executives have quietly made their way back to Davos in the desert. And yes, the summit still happens at the Ritz.

• 45:30Speaker 06

  Which, to me, feels haunted. I mean, I don't think I would even want to step foot in there, but who knows if they're even thinking of the history of that place.

• 45:39Rund Abdelfatah?

  The Trump family also ramped up its business with Saudi Arabia after Trump left office.

• 45:44Speaker 06

  He would talk to Jared Kushner a lot. They would talk over WhatsApp.

• 45:48Rund Abdelfatah?

  Trump's son-in-law, Jared Kushner, signed a $2 billion deal with MBS.

• 45:53Speaker 03

  I think that deal signified a new era that is now completely proliferated everywhere.

• 46:01Speaker 03

  We live in an era where everything is done by the deal guys.

• 46:06Rund Abdelfatah?

  In 2025, Trump again chose Saudi Arabia as his first overseas trip after coming back into office. He'd arrived in Saudi Arabia with a huge entourage of top American executives. They all lined up to meet Prince Mohammed. And he invited MBS to the White House, marking his return to the US for the first time since Chogyuji was killed.

• 46:28Speaker 05

  We have an extremely respected man.

• 46:33Speaker 07

  In the Oval Office today and a friend of mine for a long time.

• 46:36Speaker 03

  MBS really had a very in-control kind of feel about him. He also made jokes during the dinner. So what's the deal, I'm sorry, you lose a bit?

• 46:48Speaker 03

  When I saw the picture of the dinner, everyone was sitting around in their black attire and everything, I just thought to myself, this is a complete 360 moment. Everything is back to what it was like before.

• 46:59Speaker 07

  And I want to thank you for a $1 trillion investment and contribution toward our country. That's a lot of jobs. Thank you very much. Thank you. Please.

• 47:10Speaker 06

  I think it signifies that Saudi Arabia is probably the most important Trump ally. I mean, they have been one of his great benefactors in one way or another, whether it's on the political stage or really helping to put some money in his pocket.

• 47:24Speaker 03

  People like the Trump administration think of themselves more like sheiks than they do think of themselves like presidents in the traditional sense, where it's all kind of blended together, you know, power and money and everything.

• 47:34Speaker 04

  Everything, including crypto, which has unlocked a whole new level of business for the so-called deal guys around the world. And these business connections have become more clear and public since 2026 began.

• 47:48Rund Abdelfatah?

  In January, Saudi real estate developer Dar Global announced a $10 billion deal with the Trump Organization to build multiple Trump-branded buildings in Saudi Arabia.

• 47:59Speaker 04

  In February, the Board of Peace met for the first time to discuss future development plans for the reconstruction and governance of Gaza. Among the board members are Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff.

• 48:12Speaker 06

  Steve Witkoff, a close friend of Trump's, also his top diplomatic envoy.

• 48:17Speaker 04

  And a co-founder of World Liberty Financial.

• 48:20Speaker 06

  The main Trump crypto companies.

• 48:21Rund Abdelfatah?

  Witkoff and Kushner were also in charge of the failed nuclear negotiations that preceded the war with Iran. When the war began, retaliatory strikes on Saudi Arabia and other Gulf countries followed. In late March, there were reportedly a number of calls between MBS and Trump, in which MBS urged him to continue the war, seeing it as, quote, "a historic opportunity to remake the region." Iran is Saudi Arabia's longtime rival, and Saudi Arabia has historically marketed itself as a key defender of Palestinians. In private, MBS has reportedly said he doesn't care personally about the Palestinian issue, though a Saudi official later disputed this.

• 49:06Rund Abdelfatah?

  He's also indicated he may eventually move to recognize Israel if there's a clear path to a Palestinian state and if the price is right.

• 49:15Speaker 03

  The custodian of the two holy cities of Mecca and Medina agreeing to recognize Israel in that way is such a big thing. He's also a deal guy, just like Whitkoff and Kushner. And he's thinking, if I'm going to do that deal, I'm going to make sure that I really get something that's really strong. And what he wants is things like a security relationship that's maybe similar or even better than the Qatar one. He also wants to have nuclear power in Saudi Arabia.

• 49:40Rund Abdelfatah?

  MBS is already doing some business discreetly with Israel, especially in the cybersecurity and surveillance sector.

• 49:52Speaker 04

  And now there's a new superpower that it seems like everyone is racing towards: AI.

• 50:00Rund Abdelfatah?

  For us, like the average people, a lot of us are interacting with AI in terms of chatbots and sort of a tool for work and things like that. But on a higher level, governmental level, AI and all of that is also being conceived as surveillance technology, defense tech, military tech.

• 50:17Speaker 06

  Yeah, I think Silicon Valley is helping build up the global surveillance state. And I think that's a good term for it. I mean, consider what Larry Ellison, the founder of Oracle, said. The police will be on their best behavior because we're constantly recording, watching and recording everything that's going on. Citizens will be on their best behavior because we're constantly recording and reporting everything that's going on.

• 50:46Speaker 06

  I think what was happening before was perhaps Silicon Valley didn't realize that they were creating tools of control, that something like Twitter could become a tool of control. I think now Silicon Valley knows that they're making tools of control. And, you know, how is AI being used now? Well, it's being used in Gaza to pick out targets for the IDF to bomb people. You know, us here in America, for the Border Patrol and ICE now to find people to deport.

• 51:16Speaker 06

  It's these much more draconian, aggressive, top-down, security state-style forms of governance that we're seeing AI enable.

• 51:27Speaker 03

  The greater Silicon Valley is supported by dictatorships who want these surveillance tools.

• 51:35Rund Abdelfatah?

  Ali Al-Ahmed has been in the US for 30 years now. He's continued to be a vocal critic of the Saudi regime, even though that's meant he can no longer be in contact with his family back in Saudi Arabia to protect them from repercussions.

• 51:52Speaker 03

  I want to be with my parents and with my family. I love my country. I love my land.

• 51:58Rund Abdelfatah?

  He's received threats from the Saudi government and also offers.

• 52:03Speaker 03

  I got offers of millions of dollars. This is because they do not fathom anyone outside and inside to speak freely.

• 52:16Rund Abdelfatah?

  But Ali isn't a deal guy.

• 52:19Speaker 03

  I can sleep on the floor. I can eat a piece of bread and a slice of tomato, and I'll be fine. I will not complain. The thing I want is to be free, to talk, to say something. That freedom of me speaking my mind, I cannot put a number on it.

• 52:48Rund Abdelfatah?

  And that's it for this week's show. I'm Rande Abdelfatah.

• 52:52Speaker 04

  I'm Ramtin Arablouei, and you've been listening to Throughline from NPR.

• 52:56Rund Abdelfatah?

  This episode was produced by me.

• 52:58Speaker 04

  And me and?

• 53:00Speaker 00

  Julie Kane. Anya Steinberg. Casey Miner. Christina Kim. Devin Kadyama. Irene Noguchi.

• 53:07Speaker 04

  Diana Mulholland. Thomas Coltrane. Fact checking for this episode was done by Kevin Vogel. Also, thank you to the national news, Vivian Narim, Natasha Tikku, Johannes Dirkie, Dylan Kurtz, Rebecca Farrar, Leana Simstrom, Beth Donovan, and Tommy Evans.

• 53:26Rund Abdelfatah?

  This episode was mixed by Robert Rodriguez. Music for this episode was composed by Ramtin and his band Drop Electric, which includes Navid Marvi.

• 53:36Speaker 06

  Sho Fujiwara. Anya Mizani.

• 53:39Speaker 04

  And finally, if you have an idea or like something you heard on this show, please write us at [email protected].

• 53:48Rund Abdelfatah?

  Thanks for listening.

• 53:53Speaker 02

  Stay tuned for the following announcements and messages from our sponsors. This message comes from Google Workspace with Gemini, one subscription that does it all, personalized AI and premium business versions of Gmail, Google Docs, Drive, and more. Try it free for 14 days at g o o dot g l e slash Workspace with Gemini.

• 54:16Speaker 06

  This message comes from Capella University. That spark you feel, that's your drive for more. Capella University's FlexPath learning format lets you earn your degree at your pace without putting life on pause. Learn more at capella.edu.