'Business As Usual'

Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, one of the world’s richest men, speaks about his detention by the Saudi government

- Erik Schatzker

Prince Alwaleed bin Talal has taken a few knocks en route to becoming the richest investor in the Middle East and one of Saudi Arabia’s most recognisable faces. In the 1980s, he went broke. In 2008, during the financial crisis, he lost billions of dollars on Citigroup. But nothing compares to the humiliation he sustained over the past few months. Last November, Alwaleed’s uncle, King Salman, and his cousin, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, engineered a government roundup of alleged fraudsters, embezzlers, and money launderers that landed Alwaleed in Riyadh’s now- infamous RitzCarlton hotel. He didn’t leave for 83 days.

I saw Alwaleed in late October, the week before he became a prisoner of the state. We spent an evening at his desert camp chatting about the financial markets and U.S. politics, watching a soccer match on TV, taking a walk through the sands, and eating a late dinner in the cool midnight air. Seven weeks after his release, in mid-March, I returned to the kingdom. Alwaleed had decided to break his silence and grant me an interview on Bloomberg Television.

We met informally the day before the interview at his palace in Riyadh. As I waited in the foyer, the prince descended the grand staircase from the second floor. He was dressed casually in a beige thobe, brown wool sports jacket, and sandals, and he struck me as relaxed. Over the next two hours, between sips of Arabic coffee and ginger tea, while his five granddaughters sang and danced to Katy Perry’s Hot n Cold in the palace gym, he recounted his ordeal.