Throughline - How Saudi Arabia shaped Silicon Valley

Episode Date: March 26, 2026

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.To manage podcast ad preferences, review the links below:See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

November 4, 2017. The phone rings at around 4 in the morning. A Saudi prince named El-Walid bin Talal answers. Come right away. 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 Adwalid is told to get in. His driver, his guards, and his assistant are put in a different car.

There's no time to grab his phone. And Prince El Walid finds himself completely alone. It's a long drive up, almost like an official kind of road, heavy security on the outside and walls around it. 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.

It's a huge fancy hotel, like visiting a French palace or something like that. The car comes to a stop outside the grand entrance of the Ritz, and Prince Al-Walid is ushered into the lobby. The lobby is luxurious with really beautiful polished marble floors and this traditional type of incense called Ood is always burning in the lobby. 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. With nothing else to do, he turns on the TV. Breaking news fills the screen. 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.

His captors have removed the locks on the doors, removed the curtains, lock the windows, dismantled the shower doors, so nobody could hurt themselves. Overnight, the writs had been converted into a makeshift prison. By morning, Prince Al-Wali

is locked in alongside hundreds of other wealthy Saudis. Guards walk the hallways 24-7, manning the exits. Hotel staff are directed to cancel upcoming reservations. And then what happened to these people was they underwent a series of sort of interrogations. To suss out how much of each prisoner's wealth had been gained through corruption. 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 it.

trouble is you just signed over huge amounts of wealth back to the state. The Ritz was closed off to visitors for three months while this was going on. 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. It's one of the craziest events that I've ever heard about in my lifetime. Some called it The Shakedown, spelled S-H-E-I-K, a pun on the title for, for an Arab leader or chief. I mean, there was many, many hundreds of billions of dollars in this hotel

of people worth that much money. And it was no secret who was behind it all. The kingdom's de facto ruler, crown prince Muhammad bin Salman, who the world would come to know as MBS. 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.

Money that would help the Crown Prince transform how the U.S. does business. 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. Elon Musk's XAI gets $3 billion investment from Saudi-backed AI firm. The biggest YouTuber in the world, Mr. Beast, 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. Kushner, with the help from Saudi Arabia, took video game giant electronic arts private in the largest leverage buyout ever. A new Trump tower in Saudi Arabia in a cryptocurrency venture. Saudi Arabia is helping the Ellison family.

Ellisons who are major Trump supporters. Launch a hostile takeover of Warner Brothers in their bid to control U.S. media. If we're amam any for us, we'll have to make on it. if it's 10-fursa, 100,000, and 1,000 for example. 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. 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 U.S. economy. 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 Randad al-Defat-Dagh.

I'm Ramtin Arablui. On this episode of ThruLine 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. You're listening to Thule Line from NPR. I'm Abdul from Michelle Canada. Part one. The Startup Prince.

Muhammad bin Salman is like your classic millennial. This is journalist Bradley Hope. He's the co-author of the book, Blood and Oil. Muhammad bin Salman's ruthless quest for global power. 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. So how did this speak? manga-loving tech geek, become the guy who would stage the shakedown at the writs? The answer is a saga of power and intrigue that could pass for an episode of Game of Thrones or Succession. 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. It was the center of Islam for the world.

But in the early 1900s, things began to change. Muhammad bin Salman's grandfather, who is known in the West as Ibn Saud, took over the country through a kind of daring invasion. There was a lot of jockeying for power happening among the tribes of the region. Ibn Sad wanted to reclaim the glory and ancestral lands of the House of Saud and unify the Arabian Peninsula. He staged a two-prong 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. 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. 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. 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. Ibna Saud cut a deal. They created what would become known as the Arabian American Oil Company, or a Ramco. and the search began. They found oil, but not in commercial quantities.

It was not encouraging. They drilled again. No luck. And again, still failure. And then it happened. They did find a huge amount of oil. Over the next few decades, Aramco grew into the most profitable company on the planet,

and the Al-Sahud 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. This 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. This is Ali al-Ahmad. He's a Saudi journalist and dissident who's been living in the U.S. 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.

I can see the port, the main oil port. He lived in a city on the coast of the Persian Gulf. An ancient city that goes back thousands of years. Ailey 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. Riyadh is drinking fresh water and getting best electric power.

We didn't have any paved roads in the city. 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. We were so worried about these raids.

We had to bury our books, non-political books. One of Ali's favorite band books was about the Bermuda Triangle. As a child, I remember this big sign on the highway. This is with the government. It says, Ache deemuatine, la tufakker, we're we'll neufqq. Dear citizen, do not think.

We will think for you. 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. They had an alert to track some activists that were coming from Iran, I think.

And they arrested us in Dauha, Qatar. So they didn't tell you what the charges were or anything. They just picked you out? No, nothing. You know, you are from a population that they don't like. You must be guilty. It was the middle of Ramadan, the month of fasting for Muslims.

July, my God, it was He and his family members were put on a bus. Like school bus with no AC. With other detainees. And the thing was packed. We had kids and people just started throwing up. When they finally crossed into Saudi territory, and the bus came to a stop outside a prison.

They had to drag me from the bus. You resisted. Resisted. So they put chains on my hand and my legs. And I remember reading made in cancer. California, USA. And then we were separated in different cells. Ali was then interrogated.

This investigator, he said, what did you do? I said, I'm supposed to ask you that. And there's no right to remain silent or anything like that. No, no, no. There's no thing. There's torture, and the people were crawling. Later, I found that one kid, 17-year-old, he died in the same area I was. After a few weeks, Ali and his family were released.

His dad was able to pull some strings to get them out. 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. His father was still number three on a list. There was two other older brothers before him. And even if his father, some of his father, some of 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. It was kind of unimaginable. Plus, the royal family had ballooned. Ibn Saud'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. They almost sound like posh British people. MBS decided to stay in Saudi Arabia. He went to university in Saudi Arabia. His English wasn't even that great for a long time. He wanted to be close to his father, Salman. He was kind of the family disciplinarian, handling these different families, disputes. So he had files on everybody. All that intel his father had went into a kind of burn book, which MBS had access to, and which you would later use to consolidate power.

And then, in less than a year, MBS's fortunes changed dramatically. 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, His father became essentially the guaranteed second in line to be the king. 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.

It was like almost Shakespearean people conniving against Salman coming into power. MBS put together a team of people he trusted. 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? NBS just became a round-the-clock tactician. Clearing the path for his father to take the throne and proving himself indispensable.

He switched gears from the young kind of business-oriented guy into this kind of king in the waiting. In early 2015, word began to spread that the sitting king of Saudi Arabia, King Abdullah, was very sick. MBS actually went to King Abdullah with his father in the hospital, and King Abdullah was on a respirator. He was basically dead. Something those closest to him were trying to conceal for as long as possible.

And MBS barged into the room. The secretary of the king was there to make sure nobody sees the king on a 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. King Abdullah died at the age of 90. King Abdullah's half-brother Solomon immediately succeeded him. Salman himself was getting up there in age.

So when he took the throne, MBS would be pulling the strings. His cousin told me he is like a bull in a china shop. What he says goes, no matter what anybody else says. 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 Aramco. And he launched a deadly bombing campaign in Yemen. American-made bombs. The Obama administration sold him. MBS hoped he could quickly stomp out the Houthi rebels there. who were backed by Saudi Arabia's longtime rival, Iran. 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. 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. Winning over Silicon Valley. The way things get done in the world are through a combination of focus and personal connection. The third factor is 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 U.S. 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's 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. 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. MBS had gotten the idea from his cousin, Prince Al-Waleed 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-Sahouds weren't exactly known for taking risks, which in the 21st century was becoming more and more of a problem. Saudi Arabia was in a bit of a crisis. They were conservative economically, they were conservative politically. In the age of internet and social media. They were conservative socially. Women couldn't drive and had strict dress codes. Movie theaters were outlawed.

And there's this going to be a problem in the future. 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. He's the kind of person that drinks coffee out of a mug with his own face on it. He was the second biggest investor in Twitter, owning more stock than even Jack Dorsey, It's then CEO. And he had shares in Rupert Murdoch's companies, Fox, and News Cor. 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. Uber has turned to the Middle East for its biggest investment ever. The Uber deal wasn't particularly well-structured or valid. Company announcing a $3.5 billion raise from Saudi Arabia's public investment fund. An unprecedented amount of money for a single investment. It was just saying, we've arrived. This is the new Saudi era. Coming up, Saudi Arabia goes on a spending spree.

Hi, this is Justin Whitlow from Leicester, North Carolina. And you are listening to Three Line. Part two. Friends in High Places. 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. 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. had helped unmasked Saudi Twitter users, as in find their IP addresses, their phone numbers, helped discover where they live, personal information, and pass that information along to Saudi authorities. This is journalist Jacob Silverman, author of the book, Gilded Rage, Elon Musk, and the radicalization of Silicon Valley.

I've talked to Saudi exiles who live in the U.S., who believe that their family members in Saudi Arabia were unmasked and arrested because of this process. Five years earlier in December 2010, Twitter had helped ignite the Arab Spring. The story of a Tunisian fruit vendor named Muhammad Buzizi 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.

For a while, Saudi Arabia was one of the biggest markets and certainly the biggest market in the Middle East for Twitter. It was a digital public square where free thought was allowed, even if their physical reality remained unchanged. 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 some.

Saudi Arabia because it's a very repressive country. By 2015, Saudi Prince Al-Walid bin Talal was a major investor in Twitter. In 2018, the Arabic-language Twitter account of Saudi journalists and dissident Ali al-Ahmad was suspended. He'd also been a target of the spy ring. 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. Now they were paying the price.

People are spending years in prison, decades in prison because of this action. One of the men who was allegedly unmasked by the spying was recently executed. The full extent of the damage isn't quite known, and that may be happening much more widely than just Twitter. The two Saudi spies managed to first. flee the U.S. without consequences and are believed to be living in Saudi Arabia. The Lebanese-American spy stood trial in a U.S. 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 spiring back in Saudi Arabia. They took away his name, but, you know, somebody leaked it, and it was pretty obvious. Badr al-Assakir, a close advisor. of Saudi crown prince Muhammad bin Salman, known widely as MBS, who runs his private foundation. 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.

In June 2016, six months after the FBI showed up at Twitter headquarters, Jack Dorsey and MBS met in the U.S. They took photos together, smiling and shaking hands. The photos were posted to Twitter by none other than Badid al-Azacid, the alleged head of the spiring. To my knowledge, Jack Dorsey never commented on any of this.

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. 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 change maker prince who was going to change Saudi Arabia forever. 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. The question was, could that paranoid hidden worlds

and his public image as a changemaker co-exist forever? Over the following year, each season brought that question closer and closer to a tipping point. Spring, 2017. 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. 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. To a lot of people at the time,

it seemed like a strange choice. But behind the scenes... The UAE ambassador to Washington, D.C., started putting Mohamed 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 Trump administration to be seen like they were helping change something

or having an impact. MBS rolled out the red carpet for Trump at the Ritz-Carlton-Riyadh. I stand before you as a representative of the American people to deliver a message of friendship and hope and love. 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.

But inside Saudi Arabia, MBS would soon ramp up a campaign of political repression. People were being stopped in the streets and their phones were being checked by police. Activists who had led the push for women to drive were arrested. So were dissenting clerics. No protest of any kind would be tolerated. 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.

And there were allegations of war crimes in Yemen, where MBS was continuing his military campaign with weapon support from the U.S. 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. 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. Fall 2017. This was a huge coming out introducing Saudi Arabia. Five months after MBS put on a show for Trump at the Ritz. He up 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. Technology. New fronties. Unleashing innovative ideas. Celebrating the visionaries among us. I was at the Wall Street Journalist. 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. So then we all went back to wherever we were, we lived. A few weeks later, suddenly there was this news that came out in this very unofficial way. Breaking news. Breaking news out of Saudi Arabia. Palace intrigued to the nth degree. We're seeing a truly historic upheaval unfold right now. A royal purge in Saudi Arabia.

Founding up several high-profile people. All these bold moves, NBA. was making in Yemen and Silicon Valley within Saudi itself had made a lot of the other royals mad. And so he really had to sleep with one eye open at that time. As had become his MO by this point, he decided to try something pretty extreme to stifle dissent. Q. The Shakedown. There has been a lot of news this week out of Saudi Arabia, which is basically America's crooky rich uncle who occasionally beheads people.

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

You know, that's the big question. They say it's all about corruption. I really don't believe that. 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. This event of the Ritzk created some cracks in the surface, but it didn't break. Spring, 2018.

The Ritz-Coltern Hotel has finally reopened more than three months after it was converted into a gilded prison. 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 whistlestop tour through the U.S. And he gets a very warm welcome. He meets with President Trump in Washington, Wall Street bankers in New York, and tech CEOs in Silicon Valley, looking to make deals. You would think that maybe U.S. businessman 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. He had dinner at Bill Gateshouse.

There are pictures from that visit of MBS standing with a whole bunch of top Silicon Valley venture capitalists and CEOs. There seemed to be no red line he could cross that would keep America. from doing business with him. And then, Fall 2018, Jamal Khajoggi walked into a consulate in Istanbul.

That's coming up. My name is DeVaria Sahel, and I'm calling from London, the United Kingdom. You're listening to Thru Line from NPR. Part 3. The Uncanny Valley. Where is Jamal Khashoggi? No signs of it.

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. At 1.15 p.m. on October 2nd, 2018, Jamal Khashoggi, known to Americans,

mostly through his opinion column for the Washington Post, entered the Saudi consulate in Istanbul. He never came out. People describe him often as a journalist, right? But it's a very, underdeveloped way to describe him. 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. After the Arab Spring broke out in 2010, Khashoggi began speaking out more against the Saudi regime and its autocratic policies, which landed him in hot water when MBS took over. In the MBS era, there was only two sides. There's either 100% MBS or 0% NBS.

And if you're 0% MBS, you're essentially an 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 inside Arabia, he would have to essentially disappear. He didn't really want that life for himself. So he essentially fled and escaped to America. 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 Knight of the Long Knives,

Hitler's brutal 1934 purge and consolidation of power in which hundreds of people were killed. It seems to me likely that they knew quite a bit about what Jamal Hoshoggi was doing and who he was talking to and who he was meeting with. MBS had his people keeping tabs on Hujoggi. 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. 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' phone. Neither accusation was ever proven. What we do know is that Bezos owns the Washington Post, where Khajoggi worked. And a couple months later, Khazoggi, disappeared. On the morning of October 2nd, 2018, Khashoggi headed to the Saudi consulate to pick up his marriage documents. He had recently become engaged. At 1.15 p.m., he entered the consulate. What happened next is captured on tape. And a warning, some of the details are pretty graphic. Only a few people have heard the actual tapes, but here's what they reveal. Inside the consulate, a

team of 15 hit men, Saudi security officers, were waiting for Khashoggi. One of them says, has the sacrificial animal arrived? And they all laugh. When Khashoggi 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. At first, Khashoggi resists. Then his voice changes, growing more fearful. Are you going to give me an injection? He asks. Yes, the Hachoggi resists. Yes. The Hachoggi resists. He says, he men respond. They grab Khashoggi. He's beaten and tortured before finally being strangled. His last words are, I can't breathe. One of the men, a forensic pathologist, then cuts up Khashoggi's body with a saw. And then somebody actually put on his clothes and walked around Istanbul,

acting as if they were him. To this day, authorities have never recovered his body. And this got the world's attention. 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. I think it certainly opens some Americans' eyes as to how brutal this regime could be and how aggressive MBS could be. And there were calls for accountability. Congresspeople drafted bills to stop U.S. weapons funding to Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia in its war in Yemen. A lot of business people 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. Oh, it's just one guy. No, it's not one guy. Ali al-Ahmad, a fellow Saudi dissident and journalist, knew Khajoggi personally. We have people who are much more important than Jamal Khashchee, who were killed in Saudi Arabia. He says, Khajoggi was a lot of people. wasn't the first or last person the Saudi regime targeted.

And even with the fallout from Khajoggi's murder, MBS. Didn't seem to break a sweat and really, like, really, you know, savage himself over it. He just turned all of his focus inward, all of the investment, the public investment fund focused inward. And he just slowly, patiently rebuilt. He pumped more money into Saudi Arabia's infrastructure and began clearing the way for a city of the future called Nome. 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. Which, we should know, led to the displacement of around 20,000 Saudis. There have been other foreign artists who have performed in the kingdom. He began paying big bucks for American celebrities to come to Saudi Arabia. People like Mariah Carey and Enrique Iglesias and the Backstreet Boys. 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 than $7 billion from investors, including a Saudi Prince, to help finance his purchase of Twitter. They became regular investors and his companies. And when the AI race started to heat up, Musk began depending even more on Saudi money to compete. Because these AI companies need to raise billions every few months in order to sustain the the data center build out and the outlay of resources that is required. The heads of other AI companies travel to Saudi Arabia to meet with MBS too. OpenAI's Sam Altman, Palantiers Alex Karp. The tech industry has hardly wavered in kind of its loyalty and alignment with MBS.

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. 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? The Trump family also ramped up its business with Saudi Arabia after Trump left office. He would talk to Jared Kushner a lot. They would talk over WhatsApp.

Trump's son-in-law, Jared Kushner, signed a $2 billion deal with MBS. I think that deal signified a new era that is now completely proliferated everywhere. We live in an era where everything is done by the deal guys. 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 U.S. for the first time since Khadjoggi was killed. We have an extreme...

extremely respected man in the Oval Office today and a friend of mine for a long time. MBS really had a very in-control kind of feel about him. He also made jokes during the dinner. So I want to tell them sorry, you lose the bit. 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. 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. 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. People like the Trump administration think of themselves more like shakes 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. 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. 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. 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 Whitkoff.

Steve Whitkoff, a close friend of Trump's, also his top diplomatic envoy, and a co-founder of World Liberty Financial. The main Trump crypto company. Whitkoff and Kushner were also in charge of the failed new 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. 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. 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 Witkoff 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. MBS is already doing some business discreetly with Israel, especially in the cybersecurity and surveillance sector. And now there's a new superpower that it seems like everyone is racing towards AI. 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. 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. 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.

It's these much more draconian, aggressive, top-down security state-style forms of governance that we're seeing AI enable. The greater Silicon Valley is supported by dictatorships. Who want these surveillance tools? Ali al-Ahmad has been in the U.S. 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. I want to be with my parents and with my family. I love my country. I love my land. He's received threats from the Saudi government and also offers. I got offers of millions of dollars. This is because they do not fathom anyone outside and inside to speak freely. But Hailey isn't a deal guy.

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 in my mind, I cannot put a number on it. And that's it for this week's show. I'm Randa Abd al-Fattah. I'm Ramtin-Arablui, and you've been listening to ThruLine from NPR.

This episode was produced by me. me and Julie Cain. Anya Steinberg. Casey Minor. Christina Kim. Devin Katayama. Irene Noguchi. Kiana Muratem.

Thomas Coltrane. Fact-checking for this episode was done by Kevin Vogel. Also thank you to the national news, Vivian Nareem, Natasha Tiku, Johannes Durge, Dylan Kurtz, Rebecca Farrar, Leanna Simstrom, Beth Donovan, and Tommy Evans. This episode was mixed by Robert Rodriguez. Music for this episode was composed by Ramtin and his band Drop Electric, which includes

Navid Marvi, show Fujiwara, Anya Mizani. And finally, if you have an idea or like something you heard on this show, please write us at ThruLine at NPR.org. Thanks for listening.