Few individual countries have more leverage over whether the fight against climate change succeeds than Saudi Arabia. The kingdom of 33 million people is the largest oil exporter in the world and has perhaps more control over the price of oil than any other nation. It is home to nearly a fifth of the world’s known reserves, as well as Aramco, a state-controlled oil giant that is one of the largest and most profitable companies in the world. That profitability, in turn, funds both the Saudi state and the kingdom’s growing influence efforts around the world: From Hollywood to professional sports to gaming to Big Tech, some of America’s most well-known industries are increasingly reliant investment from the Public Investment Fund (PIF), Saudi Arabia’s $925 billion sovereign wealth fund. And many of the best-connected and most prestigious professional services firms in the United States and Europe—lobbying shops, public relations agencies, consultancies, law firms, and the like—happily undertake Saudi influence efforts in exchange for lucrative contracts.
A startling proportion of this sprawling network of wealth and influence—as well as Saudi Arabia’s major role in the outcome of the climate crisis—traces back to the interests and favor of one individual. Mohammed bin Salman is the crown price of Saudi Arabia and the country’s de facto ruler. He chairs both the PIF and Aramco, which are two of the most powerful instruments of capital in the world. In just a decade, Crown Prince Mohammed, known as MBS, has risen ruthlessly from royal obscurity to a position of nearly total dominance. Along the way, he has rapidly liberalized the country’s economy, increased social freedoms, and offered effusive assurances about transitioning the kingdom away from oil and investing in clean energy—steps that have won praise from Western elites (and not just from the venture capitalists and Silicon Valley tycoons who envy MBS’s authoritarian control). Many of these same elite investors and executives will return to Riyadh later this month for the Saudi government’s annual “Future Investment Initiative,” an annual confab of networking, moneymaking, and image-laundering.
Accompanying these changes, however, have been ruthless political repression at home—of which the 2018 assassination of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi was only the most prominent example—and, on the global stage, relentless climate obstruction. Even as MBS seeks to reduce Saudi Arabia’s own reliance on oil revenue, it has worked alongside the United States, Russia, the United Arab Emirates, and other petrostates to preserve demand for fossil fuels around the world. More recently, Saudi Arabia, like many of the U.S. tech companies in which it invests, is gleefully undermining its own climate pledges in its race to build enormous, energy-hungry data centers for artificial intelligence.
Saudi Arabia, as Americans are being reminded these days, is not the only increasingly authoritarian nation reliant on oil extraction, determined to disrupt global climate negotiations, and obsessed with energy-ravenous AI. But as Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter and former Wall Street Journal publisher Karen Elliott House makes clear in her new book, The Man Who Would Be King: Mohammed bin Salman and the Transformation of Saudi Arabia, it is a crucial one. House has been traveling to Saudi Arabia for more than four decades and has borne witness to both its power and its contradictions. She spent hours interviewing the crown prince and other Saudi officials for this book. But House also has “a number of personal friends…who have literally disappeared without any official explanation,” she writes.
In June Drilled spoke with House about how Saudi Arabia has changed under the crown prince; whether MBS’s gamble on economic and social freedoms alongside civil and political repression is politically—or environmentally—sustainable; how Saudi Arabia’s oil and petrochemical industries serve its geopolitical interests; and why the kingdom’s promises about transitioning away from fossil fuels might be a bit less green than climate advocates would hope.
The conversation below has been condensed and edited significantly for clarity and accuracy.
If you prefer to listen to the entire conversation, you can check it out on the podcast here (or wherever you get your podcasts):
I’ve struggled to parse what’s real and what is hype [about] the transformation in Saudi Arabia over the last decade. There’s been a lot of talk about efforts to allow women to drive, to increase the availability of entertainment, to scale back the presence of the religious police.
But there’s also a relentless fire hose of promotion—in part from a lot of wealthy, self-interested Western investors who would like to do business with the kingdom. One of the main arguments of your book is that, at least in terms of social and economic freedom, this transition is real and consequential. Can you talk about how much the country has changed over the last decade?
What interested me is, where did Mohammed bin Salman, who’s now 39 [years old] and was roughly 29 when he began changing the kingdom, get these ideas? He grew up in the very conservative, heavy-handed religion. That’s apparently partly what motivates him to change. He was a young kid, the only thing he could do was play video games because there was no other entertainment. Kids could kick a soccer ball around in a field of garbage here and there in town.
He is motivated. He understands that they can’t live off of oil revenue forever, and that people have to be motivated and educated to work. So he is determined to bring more resources into the world of work. Women are a major, educated resource, and they’re much more motivated than most men because they haven’t had the opportunity to do anything other than teach school.
He has obviously set back political freedom. In the days when I went there under King Fahd [and later] under King Abdullah, you weren’t ever supposed to criticize the king. But in the newspapers, you could read, “The Health Ministry failed at this.” “The Defense Ministry failed at that.” [Offer] mild criticism and you didn’t wind up in prison.
[Today] I think he feels that “I’m doing these things fast. I don’t have time to have everybody telling me how to do it and getting in the way.” He thinks he knows what to do. His whole philosophy is that what’s wrong with the world is incremental thinking. You have to have out-of-the-box thinking. Lee Kuan Yew, the [autocratic former] Singaporean prime minister, had that view: “I’m in charge here. I know I’ve got to drive you [the country] hard to get you where you ought to be.”
But the changes [in Saudi Arabia under MBS] are truly significant. To your point about how much marketing hype there is, the crown prince himself is a marketer. That was my impression of him in our first meeting. I don’t mean in a cheap, hype-y way. He is self-confident and charismatic and out to convince you that, “Here’s the way things are going to be. Here’s what I’m doing to get them there.” He likes to sell, and he’s quite effective at it, I think.
Plus, they have all this money, and they hire everybody in the world to tout what’s going on in the kingdom, like Lionel Messi, the soccer player. They tried to hire him for their soccer club. He said no. But they pay him [$25 million over three years] to promote their attempts to get the World Cup, which they did, and the country’s tourism business.
One of the things I found most remarkable in the book was the fact that most Saudis had not even heard of MBS as recently as 2015. A decade later, you describe him as having pretty much total control over the government [and] the country. How has he maintained that kind of absolute power over so many aspects of the country in such a short time?
In at least two ways. One, 60% of the country is under 30 years of age. They want change. Some of them are conservative, but most want change. He has offered them entertainment and jobs. And for those who are less enamored, he’s offered strong political suppression.
[In 2017] he put most of the senior royals in the Ritz Carlton, along with prominent businesspeople, [and] forced them to pay what he said was ill-gotten gains. It probably was. The country was very corrupt. Under Abdullah, people said that up to 30% of the budget was just taken. So [MBS] tried to intimidate the royals [and] remove the religious police from the streets. The religious scholars who didn’t agree, some of them found themselves in prison. And [he used] the old Saudi way of buying people to keep people happy. The religious police are still paid; they’re just not allowed to go out on the street and arrest anyone.
[MBS relied on] a combination of intimidation and entertainment for the young. His father [King Salman] obviously agrees with these things, or [did] at the beginning. I don’t know how active or alert his father is now. When he first became king, he obviously supported MBS, and that was a big part of his ability to consolidate control. His father got rid of the first crown prince and put in a second one, and then got rid of that crown prince and put in his son. So his father has been instrumental in helping him consolidate power.
[MBS] has the reputation of willingness to use whatever means is necessary to get and retain control so that he can reform and transform the country in the way he believes it ought to go. But “he” is the emphasis.
You mentioned Lee Kuan Yew, the former strongman leader of Singapore. You compare MBS to him a few times in the book. Lee [was] beloved by Western executives and investors who prize, above all else, the free flow of financial capital—and stability. One way to preserve stability within a society is through autocracy: not permitting any democratic processes, stifling political activity and criticism and dissent. You point out that even as these social and economic freedoms have genuinely increased within Saudi Arabia, the political climate has gotten even more repressive.
Fundamentally, there’s no history in Saudi Arabia of people having any control of their lives. These were Bedouin tribes and the chief was in charge and the social contract was, “Keep me from starving and I give you my loyalty.” That’s been the social contract with the Al Saud [the ruling family] for the 300 years that they’ve been in charge of Saudi Arabia.
People want government where they can count on a decent life. They don’t want an enormous amount of corruption. I mean, when I wrote my first book, Saudis were so upset with the royal family taking so much of everything that people used to steal the sheets off their hospital bed on the theory that “If the royals can steal, so can I.” They felt it was an unfair system.
They just want government that’s transparent and accountable. I think he [MBS] has tried to provide more of that transparency, having “key performance indicators” [KPIs] for all the ministers and tracking them and publishing, “Here’s what we’re trying to do. Here’s what we’ve done. Here’s what we haven’t done.” He’s not afraid of the report card.
He is the superintendent, the principal, and the star pupil. “Mr. Everything,” people call him. He did kind of come from nowhere. He was the sixth son of his father, so he shouldn’t have amounted to anything in a hierarchical society. He had government jobs, but they weren’t prominent ones, so people didn’t know much about him. And then suddenly he’s reshaping the government and he’s the deputy crown prince and then he’s the crown prince and then he’s in charge of the Public Investment Fund [and] Aramco. Everything in the country, every entity, in essence, reports to him.
I get the impression that MBS personally is quite interested in the prestige and the reputation of firms like McKinsey, who played a big role in Vision 2030, and other Western consulting firms. I’m wondering why these firms are so involved in the government.
The Western firms all see Saudi Arabia as a place they can make money. “He’s trying to modernize, so I’ll get in there. I’ve got ideas.” His whole philosophy is, “It’s better to attempt 100 things and succeed at 50, than attempt five and succeed at four.” Because of that, he has a reason to hire umpteen advisors [and] consulting firms to advise on this, that, and the other. The Line, the big city [in the futuristic development of Neom] that they’re building, or planning to build—
Important distinction.
Yes, it’s not there yet. They hired five different architectural firms, not one. They kind of put them all together and let the architects debate each other and then Mohammed debates with them and then that’s the end of the debate. He decides. As somebody said to me, “We used to debate and never decide. Now we decide and never debate.”
But all those firms are there to make money. Because he’s trying to do literally Mao’s “let a thousand flowers bloom”—he’s trying to let a thousand projects bloom—they’re all rushing in to get a piece of the money. I’m sure that much of what they do is overcharge and underperform.
You mention in the book the succession of five-year plans for transitioning the kingdom away from relying so much on oil, and how those five-year plans have been published time and time again and nothing has fundamentally changed. Can you talk about where the kingdom is at in its reliance on oil?
Oil is still the major source of revenue. It used to be about 70, 80% of budget revenue [and] 40% of the GDP of the country. The goal is to get non-oil to 60, 65% of GDP. They haven’t made that much progress yet. But they are, I believe sincerely, trying to develop renewable energy because the Saudis are the most profligate energy users in the world. They use [approximately] 3.7 million barrels a day for 30 million people—much more than anybody except China and the U.S., who have vastly greater populations.
They want to have renewable energy [at home] so that they can keep some of the fossil fuels to sell to the world because their oil is the cheapest in the world to produce. It’s roughly $3 a barrel, so when it’s selling at $80, that’s huge profit. They don’t want to run out of the ability to have oil to sell.
Secondly, they’re in a climate that is incredibly hot. They already have 95 days a year that the temperature is above 100 [degrees Fahrenheit]. It’s hard to develop tourism when you have such excessively hot days, and tourism is one of the industries they’re trying to grow. According to RAND, there are going to be 180 days over 95 degrees by [2050], so they do need to do what they can.
Nothing they’re doing is going to meet the Paris Accords [to keep global temperatures from rising more than 1.5 degrees Celsius]. China’s [also] ruining that, [and] various others. But they do have an incentive, I think, to produce as much renewable energy as they can, both to reduce the greenhouse gases they produce and to have oil replaced by sun and wind so they can sell it for more money.
They’re putting a chip on every possible option for energy production—green energy, solar, wind. The two [fossil fuels and renewables] are not mutually incompatible. The state of Texas is one of the few places that has managed to reduce the role of oil in its GDP. It is still America’s largest energy producer and also America’s largest producer of renewable energy. I think that’s exactly what MBS’s goal is: “We want to be a big producer of renewable energy—we need it, we use it, we can try to sell it. And we also want to be a major producer of oil and gas because the world is going to need it.” They have more time, they believe, to get the economy off oil. But they need to keep the country from being seen as too hot to visit.
You describe them as striving to be “the last oil producer standing.” Is it fair to say that they’re trying to reduce their own reliance on oil, while at the same time doing what they can to preserve global demand for oil as long as possible?
I would say that’s fair. They want to reduce their own demand for oil so they can have it to sell to the world. Prince Abdul Aziz, the energy minister, says [paraphrasing], “We have to not write off the third world. We can’t be so pure and holy about our air and climate change that we in essence say the rest of the 700 million people who still burn sticks for heat, that’s the only heat they can have, [that] they’re not going to be able to have oil. They deserve a chance to develop.” He’s very big on the idea that you can’t tell most of the world they have to stop their development right where they are because elite Western nations don’t want any more greenhouse gases released.
You talk in the book [about] some of the consequences, from an energy and climate perspective, of Saudi Arabia’s growing relationship with China, particularly in petrochemicals. You write that “Aramco believes the market for turning oil into chemicals will last beyond the uses of oil for gasoline.”
“Oil for gasoline” is what we often think of as the source of the climate crisis, at least from a day-to-day, individual perspective. But what does it mean for this growing investment in petrochemicals, particularly between two countries that are huge consumers of energy?
Saudi Arabia [has] a distrust of the United States from at least the Obama administration forward, but even with George W. [Bush]. And Mohammed bin Salman wants to be a big man on the world stage. He has to deal with Russia to control global energy prices. He deals with China because China is the biggest buyer of Saudi oil.
He wants a relationship with China, so investing in China and having China invest in Saudi is something that I think he sees as a good geopolitical investment. I don’t know if it’s a good energy investment. But the Chinese are doing all kinds of work in Saudi Arabia and the Saudis seem to just be investing money in petrochemical plants there. I don’t think the Saudis actually need China for petrochemicals. They’ve got their own. Personally, I think it’s more of a political investment than an energy investment.
I wanted to ask you about Jamal Khashoggi because you knew him pretty well. You’ve [also] gotten to know a number of other Saudis who have been imprisoned, some of whom are still imprisoned, for criticism or alleged criticism of the government. I think you describe it as “threatening national security,” one of the catch-all allegations against critics.
Under King Abdullah, [Khashoggi] was a journalist in various newspapers and interviewed Osama bin Laden. King Abdullah’s government seemed to use him for foreigners like me to talk to—you know, if you want[ed] to talk about society in Saudi Arabia. I had dinner with him in Jeddah a couple of times, once with his wife, and saw him in Riyadh also. He worked for Prince Al Waleed bin Talal, the rich Saudi prince [and] investor in a lot of American companies. They were trying to start a new TV channel in the Middle East, which began right after King Salman came to power. It was shut down immediately.
The last time I saw [Khashoggi], we had lunch in the Al Khozama Hotel in Riyadh, which has since been torn down. In my recollection of the 20 years I knew him, he didn’t criticize the royal family, but he was confident enough to explain things in not a tentative way. He did not criticize the crown prince in that last lunch [in 2016]. He expressed his unhappiness that he was not being allowed to write anymore. And he said, “I would prefer to have democracy, but at least we have KPIs.” He would prefer the ballot, but at least there was some accountability. He had a good sense of humor. Then he left not too long thereafter to come to the United States and became a columnist. I never saw him again. It was a big shock when you see him walking into the Saudi consulate in Istanbul on the film and not walking out.
As I said in the book, the only genuine human rights activist I ever knew was Mohammed al-Qahtani, who worked for the government. He was determined to change Saudi Arabia through its own law. He wasn’t somebody calling for protests. He planned to do it legally. But he asked the king to remove his half-brother, the interior minister, and that was considered criticism, near treason. He was put in prison for 10 years. Then, when he was supposed to get out, he “disappeared.” I was told in March of this year when I was there that he is now out and is at his apartment in Riyadh, not saying anything. I believe that is probably true, but I have not been able to personally test it.
The other was my translator for the first book. We worked together for five years, nearly six years. He was also working for the government. And I have no idea what happened to him. Nobody professes to know. We kept in touch with each other, and then in the fall of 2021, when I tried to reach him on WhatsApp, I never got an answer. This year, when I tried again, as I do routinely on that number, a man answered and said, “I am not Abdullah al-Shammary. This is my number. I’ve had it for six months.” So I don’t know what happened to Abdullah, and I still hope to learn.
He was definitely not a political activist. He had a family and children. He was a religious man and understood the system well. I can’t believe he did anything that would have gotten him in trouble, because I never heard him, in 10 years, say anything critical about any of the royal family. That part is sad, to see people disappear.
I was struck in the book by the extent to which MBS seems to be really focused on how he is perceived. I wondered if you thought that might explain some of the willingness to lock up people like a Twitter user who has nine followers. People who clearly pose no threat to the regime or to MBS. This combination of spending so much money on consultants and PR gurus to create a certain image of the kingdom internally, but also externally to investors and companies and potentially tourists, and also policing speech so aggressively—particularly online, which is where perceptions are often created these days. I’m wondering if you see a link between those.
He clearly does have an obsession with how he and the kingdom are perceived. I think it’s like the old French line: “He is the state.” So it is important that he be positively perceived, because that’s the only way the state can be positively perceived in his mind.
He was obviously bothered by the way the world treated him right after Khashoggi. I still have this picture—not only the high five with Putin, but he stood there at the G20 with his bisht wrapped around him and his arms folded and the other heads of state walked by him without saying anything. His view, I think, is the best defense is a good offense. Don’t disappear. Hold your ground, and it will eventually get better.
