Amr Nabil/AP Photo
The conceit of the conference is that Saudi Arabia can be abstracted from Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who is hardly ever mentioned yet remains the unspoken force behind the events.
Larry Summers was reminiscing on stage with former Google CEO Eric Schmidt about their old friend Henry Kissinger. “Henry had many fascinating, complex, and nuanced beliefs, but I’m not sure any was more central than the idea of order and predictability as a prerequisite for anything else good to happen,” Summers, the Harvard economist and former Treasury secretary, said.
“Henry could not have said it better, and we miss him,” Schmidt replied.
The venue, a Saudi investment conference in Miami, was a fitting tribute to the late statesman known for a particular brand of realpolitik.
No one loves Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman more than America’s elite. In recent years, we’ve seen leaders, investors, and celebrities hold out a Saudi exception to human rights in the service of a blurry concept of national interests that requires the U.S. to constantly compromise its values in service of an autocrat. And so MBS has been welcomed back into the establishment fold, and he won over Washington. And now he’s taking a victory lap.
When Saudi Arabia convened a 2018 summit in Riyadh, businesspeople shielded their name tags from view, sheepish about seeking MBS’s money just days after journalist Jamal Khashoggi’s murder. But the stigma has apparently worn off, and big names in finance, tech, media, and entertainment showed up at the Miami edition of Davos in the Desert.
The entire conceit of the conference is that Saudi Arabia can be abstracted from MBS, who is hardly ever mentioned yet remains the unspoken force behind the events. The host, the Future Investment Initiative Institute, a mouthful, is essentially the crown prince’s personal think tank. Session after session offered platitudes and ruminations on the least controversial ideas ever—AI is going to change the world! Climate is important! Sports bring people together! The two-day gathering was titled “On the Edge of a New Frontier,” itself a sort of redundant name. (Isn’t a frontier an edge?)
Yasir Al-Rumayyan, governor of a major sovereign wealth fund that’s currently under Senate investigation, led the proceedings. The Public Investment Fund that Al-Rumayyan runs is the conference’s founding partner and powers its lavish events. That Al-Rumayyan has $70 billion in annual investments to dole out is enough to draw out financial titans, curious entrepreneurs, and former Trump officials.
Jared Kushner, who had grown a beard, was talking about his theory of investing, without noting that MBS’s sovereign wealth funds had reportedly contributed $2 billion to his Affinity Partners. Steve Mnuchin, who similarly snared $1 billion of Saudi funds for his Liberty Strategic Capital, wore a suit and dress sneakers and talked about Israel as a tech hub. Mike Pompeo, in a tie, said that U.S. leadership in the world requires a “stability model” that involves working with “like-minded nations,” though “they’re not all going to be democracies.” Little wonder he rushed U.S. arms to Saudi Arabia as secretary of state as part of an end run around Congress.
Doing business with Saudi Arabia has become so normalized that the CEOs of major corporations and investment firms showed up in droves. There was Accenture’s Julie Sweet, Blackstone’s Stephen Schwarzman, and Thiel Capital’s Jack Selby. David Rubenstein—the billionaire who has played host to President Joe Biden at his Nantucket estate—spoke alongside his daughter Gabrielle. (This year, the Biden administration didn’t send an emissary, but the deputy commerce secretary, Donald Graves, attended in 2021.)
In a world where the U.S. is engaged in a cold war with China, tech titans have decided that it’s kosher to embrace Saudi Arabia.
Journalists have kept a distance from Saudi Arabia after the dismemberment of Washington Post columnist Khashoggi, but in Miami the moderators included CNN’s Bianna Golodryga, Fox’s Maria Bartiromo, Bloomberg’s Manus Cranny, and The Wall Street Journal’s Gerard Baker.
MBS has especially used boldfaced names to rehabilitate his standing post-Khashoggi, his crackdown on women activists, and the destructive Yemen war. In Miami, there was a fireside chat with failed Senate candidate Dr. Oz. “Saudi Arabia is, I think, doing some wise investing and shifting mindsets by trying to leapfrog, in some cases, where the West is,” Oz said.
For Gwyneth Paltrow, it was just another fun public event. She spoke about how Goop had “built meaning” for its fans, in conversation with entrepreneur Moj Mahdara, a former adviser to Hillary Clinton. It was particularly incongruous when Paltrow discussed bringing more women to the cap table to fight the patriarchy.
Rob Lowe had some advice for Riyadh’s efforts to break into Hollywood and create its own film industry. “My view is there’s no reason that Saudi shouldn’t be the leader in IP in the same way they’re attempting to be the leader in sports and everything else,” Lowe said. “You need to have someone who can communicate: Why Saudi, why now.”
For all of the glitzy stage management and slick social media branding, at many moments there were fewer than 50 people watching the livestream on YouTube. But what mattered more were the opinion leaders, financiers, and tycoons in the room.
Big Tech was there, too, with Google’s Caroline Yap and Dell’s Michael Dell. Nothing was quite as obsequious as last year’s gathering in Miami when Adam Neumann, Marc Andreessen, and Ben Horowitz—all beneficiaries of Saudi Arabia’s financial largesse—gushed about how MBS is like a “founder,” except “you call him, ‘His Royal Highness.’”
Yet it came close. Alex Karp, the CEO of the growing military contractor Palantir, told the crowd of investors and entrepreneurs he’s “very pro-civil liberties” and that his company is advancing “betterment of human rights,” a bit rich for this forum. Karp has often relayed the urgency of defending democracy against authoritarianism, but he simply doesn’t apply that frame to Saudi Arabia. “You see Saudi Arabia, Emirates, other places, embracing these technologies in a way that I wish other places in the West, Europe, would, but they’re not,” he said.
In a world where the U.S. is engaged in a cold war with China, tech titans have decided that it’s kosher to embrace Saudi Arabia. Schmidt, a military-tech investor who now oversees a network of charities and a prominent think tank, explained why. “The world’s a mess,” he said. “You have two very significant wars, you have all of these problems, you have very large sets of issues in the Global South, prices have gone up because of the wars, there are enormous concerns over China, the aligned countries, India trading on both sides, etc.” He didn’t say so explicitly, but the subtext was that U.S. global leadership requires compromises.
Foreign policy is about making tough choices and, as Schmidt’s mentor Kissinger might say, pursuing national interests. Unmentioned, however, was that the Senate is currently investigating Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund for the peculiar circumstances of its takeover of the PGA Tour, and Saudi Arabia’s deployment of its investment prowess to influence U.S. politics. The PIF is going after its own consultants in Saudi court for cooperating with the probe. And none of that stopped the speakers from gushing over “His Excellency”—that is, Al-Rumayyan, the PIF’s governor, who is close to MBS and has enough money to move markets.
Chris Smalls, the Amazon Labor Union leader, had been listed as a speaker on “Powering Human Capital” for a Davos in the Desert session. “I was invited but declined due to censorship of my presentation,” Smalls wrote by email.
On Twitter, he was a little more direct: “Fuck a billionaire conference in Miami lol.”
