Khalid bin salman
“I’m sick and tired of Trump calling me and inviting me to the White House!” he often complained. Khalid could regularly be overheard talking on his phone with the likes of Bill Gates and Presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton. was expected to be worth more than $2 trillion. Until last June, when the Saudi government shelved the plan, the I.P.O. in history: the initial public offering of Aramco, the Saudi oil giant. He was in negotiations to purchase 30 percent of the famed Fontainebleau hotel in Miami Beach for $440 million, and he was selling early access to what promised to be the biggest I.P.O. handled his business affairs, and a well-connected international banker marketed his investment deals to a select few, leaving him to live a life of astonishing excess.Įver since he was a boy, he had been pitted against his royal brothers in an expensive game-to see who could “outdo the other one” in spending, he liked to say. He moved in an entourage of Rolls-Royces and Ferraris, his every whim tended to by uniformed housekeepers and armed bodyguards. Leading international investors know him as His Royal Highness Khalid bin al-Saud. After all, he has traveled the world as royalty-the son of the king of Saudi Arabia, no less.
“My name is Khalid,” he tells me, and I want to believe him.