How Saudi Arabia shaped Silicon Valley

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November 4th, 2017.

The phone rings at around four in the morning.

A Saudi prince named Adwaleed Bintalal answers.

Cup right away.

A voice commands.

Adwaleed Bintalal 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 Adwaleed 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 Adwaleed 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 Adwaleed sees an extravagant mansion

with towering columns and rows of countless windows

in the distance.

This is the Ritz Carlton Riad.

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 Adwaleed is ushered into the lobby.

The lobby is luxurious,

with really beautiful polished marble floors

and the traditional type of incense called Ud

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 Adwaleed

that he is one of those people.

His captors have removed the locks on the doors,

removed the curtains,

locked the windows,

dismantled the shower doors,

so nobody could hurt themselves.

Overnight, the Ritz had been converted

into a makeshift prison.

By morning, Prince Adwaleed 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 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 Shake Down,

spelled SHEIK, a pun on the title

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 US does business.

Basilis 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 firms.

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 Edison family.

Ellisons who are major Trump supporters.

Launch a hostile takeover of Warner Brothers

in their bid to control US media.

Elon Musk, Donald Trump,

Bill Gates, Sam Altman, Larry Ellison, Alex Carp,

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 US 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 Rondad Difetta.

On this episode of Thurline 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 Thurline from NPR,

I'm Abdul from Michelle Canada.

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Part one, the startup prints.

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.

Spend 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 manga-loving tech geek become the guy

who would stage the shake down at the ritz?

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's 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 Saud 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 Wahabists

to form the modern nation of Saudi Arabia.

Ibn Saud would be its first king.

It's a absolute monarchy.

We're 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.

An 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.

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, 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-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.

It was my father's cousins who loaded the oil

in these tankers.

We know what that oil's worth.

This is our land.

But we did not see as kids the money that's coming through.

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.

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.

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.

Riyadh is drinking fresh water

and getting the 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 banned books

was about the Bermuda Triangle.

As a child, I remember this big sign on the highway.

This is what the government says.

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 the end of Qatar.

So they didn't tell you what the charges were,

anything they just picked you up?

No, nothing.

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.

Just July, my God.

It was so hot.

He and his family members were put on a bus.

Exclusive 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.

New resisted.

Existed.

So they put chains on my hand and my legs.

And I remember reading, made in 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.

No, there is no thing 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.

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's two other older brothers before him.

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.

It was kind of unimaginable.

Plus, the royal family had ballooned.

Ibn Asawud'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 and 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 he would later use to consolidate power.

Bismillahirrahmanirrahim.

Assalamu alaikum.

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.

MBS just became around 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-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 respiratory.

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 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.

King Abdullah died at the age of 90.

King Abdullah's half-brother Salman 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 a ramco.

And he launched a deadly bombing campaign in Yemen.

American new bombs, the Obama administration, sold him.

MBS hoped he could quickly stomp out the hoothy 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 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 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.

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-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 El Saouds 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 Corp.

Even so, MBS cut Prince Al-Walid out of his future plans

and started meeting with a Japanese billionaire tech investor

named Masayoshi Sun.

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 valued.

Company announced it had $3.5 billion raised

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 spring.

Hi, this is Justin Whitlow from Western North Carolina.

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Part two.

Friends in high places.

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.

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.

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.

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 Boazizi

went viral after lighting himself on fire and 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 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 aspiring.

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 and decades in prison

because of this action.

One of the men who was allegedly unmasked by the spiring

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 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 spiring back in Saudi Arabia.

They took away his name, but you know, somebody leaked it

and it was pretty obvious.

Badid al-Assaqid, 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 that 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 US.

They took photos together, smiling and shaking hands.

The photos were posted to Twitter by none other than Badid al-Assaqid,

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 the sort of public version

which is the transformative charming changemaker prints

who is 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 sidelineing 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 coexist 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 is 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 Mohammed bin Salman forward

as this amazing changemaker in the Middle East

and he could really have huge impacts on the world.

That made NBS very attractive to the Trump administration.

It would be seen like they were helping change

something or having an impact.

NBS rolled out the red carpet for Trump

at the Ritz Carlton Riyant.

I stand before you as a representative

of the American people

to deliver a message of friendship

and hope and love.

The NBS 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,

NBS 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 Kaffali 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 NBS was continuing his military campaign

with weapons 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 NBS' vision for the future,

a green light to Silicon Valley to go all in with NBS.

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 in the pen of Trump.

Fall 2017.

This was a huge coming-out introducing Saudi Arabia.

Five months after NBS put on a show for Trump at the Ritz,

he had 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 Frontiers.

Unleashing innovative ideas.

Celebrating the vision of Islam.

I was at the Wall Street Journal,

so I came as a journalist to cover the conference.

But I mean, there was a huge conference.

I was 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 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.

Call us and treat to the nth degree.

We're seeing a truly historic upheaval unfold right now.

A royal purge in Saudi Arabia,

ending up several high-profile people.

All these bold moves NBS 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 when I opened at that time.

As had become his MO by this point,

he decided to try something pretty extreme

to stifle dissent.

Q. The Shake Down.

There has been a lot of news this week out of Saudi Arabia,

which is basically America's cookie-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 person?

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 Ritz creates some cracks in the surface,

but it didn't break.

Spring.

We are at the Ritz Galtern 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 whistle-stop tour through the US.

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 US businessmen

and oligarchs would wonder,

hey, didn't this guy just imprison a bunch of Saudi colleagues,

but that didn't seem to bother anyone.

He had dinner at Bill Gates House.

There are pictures from that visit

of MBS standing with a whole bunch

of top Silicon Valley venture capitalists

and CEOs.

There seem to be no red line he could cross

that would keep Americans from doing business with him.

And then fall 2018.

Jamal Khajogji walked into a consulate in Istanbul.

That's coming up.

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Part 3.

The Uncanny Valley.

Where is Jamal Hashoggi?

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.

At 1.15 p.m. on October 2nd, 2018,

Jamal Hashoggi, 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,

Hashoggi 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 was either 100% MBS or 0% MBS.

And if you're a 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 of Arabia,

he would have to just 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 rites to the night 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 Hashoggi was doing

and who he was talking to and who he was meeting with.

MBS had his people keeping tabs on Hashoggi.

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 were 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 Hashoggi worked.

And a couple months later,

Hashoggi disappeared.

On the morning of October 2, 2018,

Hashoggi 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.

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 Hashoggi.

One of them says, has the sacrificial animal arrived.

And they all laugh.

When Hashoggi 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, Hashoggi resists.

Then his voice changes, growing more fearful.

Are you going to give me an injection?

He asks, yes, the hitmen respond.

They grab Hashoggi.

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 Hashoggi'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 eye

as to how brutal this regime could be

and how aggressive MBS could be.

And there were calls for accountability.

Congress people drafted bills to stop US weapons funding

to 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 reduced 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 Hashoggi personally.

We have people who are much more important Jamal Khashoggi,

who were killed in Saudi Arabia.

He says, Hashoggi wasn't the first or last person

the Saudi regime targeted.

And even with the fallout from Khashoggi's murder,

MBS 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.

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 in 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 data center build out

and the outlay of resources that is required.

The heads of other AI companies traveled to Saudi Arabia to meet with MBS too.

Open AI's Sam Altman, Palantir's Alex Carp.

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

In the last few years, Silicon Valley executives have quietly made their way back

to dobbles 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 derived 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 Khachoggi was killed.

We have an extremely respected man in the Oval Office today,

and a friend of mine for a long time.

MBS really had a very incontrol kind of feel about him.

He also made jokes during the dinner.

So what's the deal?

I'm 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.

Whereas 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 in 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 al-Qazah.

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 companies.

Whitkoff 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.

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 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.

MBS is already doing some business discreetly with Israel, especially in the cyber security 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 a global surveillance state, and I think that's a good term for it.

We 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 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 define 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 I 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 instead to speak freely.

But Ali 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 my mind, I cannot put a number on it.

And that's it for this week's show. I'm Rand Abdel Fattah.

I'm Ramteen Adablui and you've been listening to Thurline from NPR.

This episode was produced by me and me and Julie Kayne.

Anya Steinberg, Casey Meiner, Cristina Kim, Devon Karayama.

Irene Noguchi, Kihanna Moghatem, Thomas Coltrane.

Fact checking for this episode was done by Kevin Vocal.

Also thank you to the National News, Vivian Nareem, Natasha Tikku, Johannes Dergi, Dylan Kurtz,

Rebecca Farar, Liana Simstrom, Beth Donovan, and Tommy Evans.

This episode was mixed by Robert Rodriguez. Music for this episode was composed by Ramteen 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 Thurline at npr.org.

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