Abstract:
We started this project because Mohammed bin Salman is one of the
world’s most important new political and business figures, but he
remains a mystery to those affected by the huge decisions he’s
making every few months. Whether it’s Middle Eastern countries
adjusting to his brusque use of power, technology companies
growing thanks to billions of dollars he has invested, families of
dissidents and regime critics whose lives have been upended, or
people affected by his decision to start using oil as an economic
weapon in early 2020, no one really has a clue what’s driving his
decision making or how he was able to rise so rapidly.
We are investigative reporters who focus on money—how it’s
spent, where it flows, and what it’s used for—so we entered into this
project believing we needed to unlearn everything we thought we
knew about Saudi Arabia and Mohammed, start from scratch, and
follow the money. The further along we got in our reporting, the
more thankful we were for having done that at the outset. So many
things we thought we knew about him were caricatures of the truth
and often spun in a way to exaggerate aspects of his personality to
make him seem deranged, heroic, or out of control.
Of course, this comes with the territory of writing about a new
ruler imposing rapid transformation on a country that hadn’t
changed much in decades, but what’s lost is deeper knowledge of
the person at the center of the storm. Without getting a better
understanding of his personality, his family, his motivations, his
