Blood and Oil

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