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Contraband Whiskey and a Secret Royal Dinner: Wall Street Goes to Riyadh

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Contraband Whiskey and a Secret Royal Dinner: Wall Street Goes to Riyadh

Are you an international business titan on the hunt for billions of dollars of Saudi oil cash? Prepare for “a mind game.”

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A group of people sits around a large round table. One of them is projected on a large screen in the background.
The executives at the Future Investment Initiative queued up for a chance at trillions of dollars of oil money that might be invested in their companies and funds.Credit…Hamad I Mohammed/Reuters

Rob Copeland

For this article, Rob Copeland made laps around a $93 lunch buffet and strolled the halls of the Ritz-Carlton in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.

Nov. 5, 2024

At exactly 6:19 p.m. last Tuesday, in a gold-trimmed hallway snaking off the lobby of the Ritz-Carlton, Riyadh, a lesson emerged in money, power and what Arabs call wasta, or influence.

The scene was opened by Marc Rowan, the private equity billionaire, pacing the carpet leading up the unremarkably named Meeting Room B — where a few minutes earlier chairs had been arranged in a semicircle.

Mr. Rowan, clad in a neat suit rather than his usual sweaters, was 11 minutes early — he actually doubled back a few times, apparently unwilling to arrive first — but was soon followed by a dozen or so titans of technology and finance, including top executives of the Carlyle Group, BlackRock, Citi and Standard Chartered, and founders of the giant hedge funds Bridgewater Associates and Third Point.

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Mr. Rowan was one of a small number of attendees at a private dinner hosted by Saudi Arabia’s crown prince.Credit…Future Investment Initiative

Once amassed, they were whisked en masse by Saudi security to a dinner in Diriyah, the ancestral home of the al-Saud family, at the farm of the crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman — who was accused of organizing the murder of a dissident journalist six years earlier, and of the imprisonment, torture and shakedown of his own family members during what his government called an anticorruption operation in this very same Ritz.

If that had made him an international pariah, the promenade of some of the biggest names in international business to his dinner table was a reminder that he is back in favor.

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