Prince Mohammed bin Salman, born in 1985 as the sixth son of King Saud, navigated a childhood marked by inferiority amidst royal privilege, surviving bullying and financial ruin from failed day trading losses. Despite nepotistic advantages like insider trading on the Tadawul Exchange and securing $800,000 through family influence, his early career included a disastrous 2008 Verizon fiber optic venture. Following King Abdullah's 2015 death, MBS bypassed designated successor Prince Murbin bin Abdulaziz to seize power, setting the stage for his subsequent consolidation of authority as Saudi Arabia's de facto ruler. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Welcome to Behind the Bastards00:04:16
Cool zone media.
Welcome back to Behind the Bastards, a podcast about Muhammad bin Salman for this week and next week with my former colleague and current friend, David Bell.
David.
Hello.
Hi.
Where can the good and bad people on the internet find you?
You know, before that, I realized I don't think I've said thank you for having me on.
I didn't say that.
Well, you don't need to take me.
I know.
It's just the thing you say on podcasts.
And it occurred to me, I was like, I didn't even say that.
Anyway, thank you for having me on.
You asked where you could find me.
Google GameFully Unemployed, G-A-M-E-F-U-L-L-Y Unemployed.
It's a movie podcast, mostly in TV.
Or watch some more news hosted by Cody Johnston news show, like a talking head, news show.
I am the head writer over there.
I'm bossing people around.
Yeah, you're the king over there.
Just like Sean bin Salman.
He kind of is in Saudi Arabia.
And Dave, I would thank you for being the guest, but actually, I'm going to thank you for watching my cat for half a year that one time.
Oh, which is much more.
That's much bigger of an ask than being on a podcast.
Oh, yeah.
That cat left a scar on me.
I'm pretty sure I still have it somewhere.
That's good.
She left some on me too.
She was a great cat.
Well, she didn't have, yeah, she got a bite on her.
Yeah, she got a bite on her.
Yeah.
She also got along with my cat way more than my current second cat gets along.
Yeah, she and Kenton were best friends for, well, again, like half a year.
Yeah.
This is an iHeart podcast.
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Hiring Saudis and Creating an Underclass00:03:06
So by the time Prince Mohammed bin Salman was born in 1985, the Saudi state had reached a level of what we might call catastrophic dependence on oil revenues.
Aramco accounted for roughly 80% of state spending, which meant that any serious drop in oil prices rendered the state insolvent, living off its savings in order to continue spending.
Nearly two-thirds of Saudi men were government employees, right?
And that doesn't mean they're working.
It just means they're government employees.
Most of them aren't doing real jobs, you know?
Most of the state jobs that they have are lifetime gigs that exist as a form of welfare.
They're a way for the House of Saud to bribe enough of the free male population to ensure there's never too much unrest because then you lose your job.
Like, I would be fine with a government that I guess you could call it bribing, but just paid us all to live.
But that's what's happening here, right?
It's just enough people so that they can screw other people.
Yeah, and they have to bring other people in the country to really fuck over, like to have an underclass that they can fuck over enough, you know?
Yeah.
And this state of affairs leads to some complications because so many jobs are lifetime things.
Giving raises to certain classes of jobs is financially untenable.
If you give like everyone who has this job a raise, that's a meaningful percentage of the country and you just can't afford to do that because you have to then keep that raise going for everyone who holds that job forever.
Instead, the government gets into a habit of adding benefits to jobs, which are salary bumps for employees who have specific skills.
Like classes of workers will get an amount of money every year for knowing how to type or knowing how to use like Microsoft Office.
And workers who have these skills get these bumps.
And there are so many of these bumps that over time, many workers get paid more as a result of all the bumps to their salary than the actual base value of their salary itself.
Saudi government employee benefits constitute between 10 and 150% of worker income by the late 20th century.
Wow.
They get around this to try to avoid paying more money, and it winds up costing a huge amount of the national budget to do that.
Right, that really got away from them.
Yeah, they're robbing Peter to also pay Peter.
Yeah.
Now, the fact that most people working in Saudi Arabia were not Saudi represented another issue.
The state, again, tries to fix the problem by fiddling around the edges.
They issue a novel benefit for employees in departments that have fewer than 50% Saudi workers.
The idea is that if they give a benefit to these jobs, more Saudis will get jobs in these fields because these jobs have higher pay.
But it actually discourages the hiring of Saudi employees because every worker in that field is like, if we hire any more Saudis, we won't get that huge pay bump.
So we have to not hire any Saudis.
We have to only hire foreign workers, right?
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's just a constant series of like really avoidable.
If like you'd spent three, if it was anyone other than a bunch of like princes who's never worked making these decisions, you'd be like, but wouldn't this just encourage them not to hire more Saudis?
Childhood Games and Family Arrangements00:14:21
It's one of those things.
Why are they going to do a thing that gets them their pay cut?
Right.
It's one of those things where you just have to kind of go like, all right, everybody, stop.
Let's start over.
Like we, it's like we're building a country.
Yeah.
We got to do a scratch.
Scratch on this country, guys.
Yeah, we got to just take all the wiring out, put in new wiring.
It's like when you're working on a screenplay or a novel that just isn't coming together.
Sometimes at some point, a certain point, you just have to throw the idea out, right?
Oh, yeah.
And some people can't do that.
It's like that, but with a country.
MBS's father, Prince Solomon, during most of MBS's childhood, all of MBS's childhood, is the governor of Riyadh.
And Muhammad bin Salman is the first son of his dad's second wife, because again, he'd had like six kids with his first wife, Sultana, but then she gets like this recurrent kidney infection and she can't have any more kids.
So he kind of reluctantly gets a second wife, this lady Fatabint Fala al-Hathlim, who is brought on to let him continue to have sons.
And over the years, she gives him six more sons.
Muhammad bin Salman is the oldest of these kids, right?
So he is the oldest son from his dad's second family.
On paper, again, he's the oldest of the second family, so he should never have wound up anywhere near becoming the king, right?
His dad shouldn't have become the king, let alone him.
He's even further down the line.
He is the sixth son of the original king's 25th son and was literally several generations removed from being in line for the throne.
Muhammad bin Salman's early life was, in Ben Hubbard's words, steeped in inherited and unearned privilege.
He spends most of his childhood in palaces, socializing with other members of the royal family, almost to the exclusion of anyone else.
When he travels from one palace to the other, it's in convoys of armored cars surrounded by bodyguards.
He's raised mostly by a mix of nannies and tutors who watch over him on a daily basis alongside servants and other household staff who don't have the power to discipline him in a meaningful way.
So most of the people raising him can't punish him.
That sounds healthy.
Can't sound yellow at him.
Exactly.
Exactly.
You can be like, I gotta have your family killed.
You know that?
If your kids are mean to me, that's how you make a monster.
Like, that's how you make a monster.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That's like if a group of people are like, hey, you know what would be funny?
If we made a monster.
Yeah.
How do we do that?
And that sounds like what you would do.
It's one of those things.
There's a sweet spot because it's bad if a kid is always afraid that his parents are going to hit him.
But it's also bad if a kid knows no one he could possibly talk to will ever smack him in the mouth, right?
It's true.
Like, it shouldn't be your parents, but you should know that if you both off to a stranger, who knows what they'll do, right?
Right.
As opposed to the stranger will be scared that you'll have their family killed, right?
One of those is worse than the other.
He's living on the holodeck.
Like, that's what it is.
It's a world exclusively built for him.
Exactly.
Yeah.
You should go through brain damage.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You should know that you could get a smack from somebody.
Someone.
Not your parents.
Someone.
Yeah.
A classmate, some guy to the bar, you know, like that.
Someone could put you in check if you're out of pocket enough, right?
That's important for people.
Right, because it seems like you don't want to learn that late.
Right.
Now, it's a measure of how fucked up this kid's upbringing is that almost no one in his life is allowed to call him by his real name, right?
That's how separated from the world this boy is.
A handful of close friends and his family members can call him Muhammad bin Salman, right?
To people actually raising him, who are largely servants, which are most of the people he talks to on a daily basis, they call him Tal Umrak.
This means literally, may God prolong your life.
But a more accurate translation is what people like, people, it's like your highness, right?
That's what they mean when they call him Tal Umrak, right?
In recent interviews, MBS has claimed that his father took responsibility for organizing his and his siblings' educations.
They were each assigned a book a week to read and would be quizzed on it.
His mother used a lot of the family clout and money to bring in scholars and academics from around the kingdom to lead discussions with the royal family and take her kids on field trips.
Per Hubbard's book MBS, quote, both parents were strict.
Showing up late for lunch with his father was a disaster, in Solomon's words.
His mother was harsh too.
My brothers and I used to think, why is our mother treating us this way?
She would never overlook any of the mistakes he made.
He later concluded that the scrutiny made him much stronger.
MBS is rather unique among the royalty we covered on the show, and that we don't have a lot of detail on his like early life, right?
You get a lot of that with like European royalty because there's someone making notes of everything they do for like the entirety of their early life, and we don't have that with him.
Um, he doesn't say much about his childhood, and the people who would know more were mostly servants and state employees, who again could be seriously punished if they told anybody, and they never do.
We know that Prince Solman, his father, continued to live with his first wife and family in a palace referred to in just as the White House.
MBS's mom, who's his dad's second wife, raises the kids in another palace, and so he's he's already the B family, right?
He grows up knowing he's the B family, but his mom takes him and his siblings to the main house regularly because she wants her kids to have FaceTime with their dad, which guaranteed them a future in the power structure in the country.
And as you might guess, this is awkward.
Yeah, it's just such a perfect storm of like, we're gonna give you an inferiority complex, but also still a palace.
Yeah, still a palace, and no one can yell at you except for your dad and mom, who will do it and then never raise you, right?
That's all they're there for is to yell at you.
Um, now, Sultana doesn't like her husband's second family, right?
And her kids follow suit.
The older kids, the first kids, treat all of the second kids like shit, you know?
Like, he is the only people who can bully him are his half-brothers, and right?
Like, they're the ones talking shit about him constantly.
And MBS's early memories involve a lot of bullying from these siblings.
He's also raised on stories of his royal ancestors that would have emphasized how normal it was for members of the Saud family to kill each other.
While his paternal grandfather was King Abdul Aziz, his maternal grandfather had murdered the king's only brother.
And the man who would be king, Karen House, adds, Indeed, MBS's maternal ancestor Daydan al-Hithlane's Ajman troops had wounded Abdul Aziz in a 1915 battle that killed his only full brother.
More than a decade later, Al-Hithlan was treacherously murdered, bearing a letter of safe conduct signed by Abdul Aziz, Al-Hithlane, and 11 companions with Abdulaziz's regional governor's son.
While he declined to stay overnight, saying his men would come looking for him if he didn't return.
His host refused to allow him to leave.
When the Ajman tribesmen did arrive, their chief's throat was slit along with those of his 11 companions.
Some Saudis see this treachery as parallel to that of a murder of a nearly a century later of Jamal Khashoggi, the Washington Post columnist invited to a Saudi consulate in Istanbul and then murdered in night in 2018.
So he grows up on stories of like his family members killing each other and was told that this is like this is what made your grandpa strong is that he killed this other grand member of your family.
Right.
It's in stories of like your grandfather fighting in the war, but it's fighting in the war against your other grandfather or something.
Yeah.
His cousin who killed his brother.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So MBS grows up constantly mocked and derided by his older, more accomplished half-brothers.
And he is initially a shy and anxious boy.
During a third-grade play, he is so uncomfortable with the idea of performing in front of people that he can't take the stage when the moment comes, even though his dad, the governor of Riyadh, is in the audience to see him.
So one of the few times his dad shows up to see him do something, he's like, I can't be a stage friend.
I can't show up on stage.
Listen, I feel for the kid.
Like, I don't want to go on stage either, but man.
Yeah.
Man, that's a rough one.
That's a rough one.
His earliest memories would have involved a lot of rage at the religious police, too.
Again, movies and music are illegal while he's a child.
Television exists in Saudi Arabia, but it sucks complete ass because you can't watch a lot of the TV that other people are watching.
It's basically just news and boring religious discussions.
Yeah, we all grew up with those like weird neighbor kids who didn't have a TV.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And they develop a complex about it.
Yeah, that's what happens.
His only entertainment option at home is video games because video games are a new enough concept that the actual fun police Saudi Arabia has hasn't gotten around to banning them yet.
Amazing.
Like they kind of get grandfathered in.
So he is, he is for his whole life to the present moment a huge video game nerd because it's just kind of the only cool thing he can do as a kid.
Incredible.
And in this way, his childhood's not that different from a lot of people listening.
His first console was a Nintendo, followed by a Neo Geo, which he got when he was six.
Biographer Karen House notes that he still has his original Neo Geo in his childhood bedroom at the family palace.
Amazing.
Kept it.
I think it's worth some money these days.
Yeah, you know, not that he cares, but yeah.
Not to sell it.
He throws that up on eBay.
Yeah.
Might be a hell of a buy.
As I said earlier, Prince Salmon was not rich by Al Saud standards.
That's again, MBS's dad.
He was certainly in the top 1% in the country, probably still in the world, but that still puts him in the bottom 50% of the house of Saud.
MBS was conspicuously aware of this fact as a child.
His monthly allowance was equivalent to about 500 US dollars while he was a fourth grader.
And it says a lot that he felt poor next to his cousins, the wealthiest of whom received about $5,000 a week, right?
If you gave me $500 as a fourth grader and brought me to the mall, I would die.
Like I would be dead from that summoning.
Yeah, that would get me killed.
Yeah.
I would have overdosed on Warhammer models.
Yeah, absolutely.
I would have had pewter poisoning or some shit.
I'd find a way.
I don't know how, but I'd die.
I would find a way.
Yeah.
MBS's frustration with his family financial situation was compounded by the fact that things were worse for Prince Salmon's second family.
Again, they live in the second palace.
They have a smaller cut of the family income.
And when the family goes on vacation to Spain, Prince Salman takes his first wife and their kids to his mansion in Marbella.
And MBS's mom and the kids have to stay at a hotel in Barcelona.
No, it's a nice hotel, right?
But you're not staying in the palace your dad owns because you're not allowed there because you're not the real family, right?
That's going to fuck a kid up.
Yeah.
It's again, perfect storm.
It's like you have so much privilege, but also like the weird anger of someone who doesn't feel like they do.
And they're giving you just nothing but video games, which I mean, I love video games.
There's something about that also.
No parental love, but all of the video games you can eat.
So as a father, Prince Solman was more hands-on than most of his family.
He sets an aggressive curriculum for his kids and he devotes a significant amount of money to their education, but he doesn't spend time with them face to face.
He manages them like Sims, basically, right?
Like he's a spreadsheet dad.
MBS grows up with the distinct impression that his dad was prioritizing his first family, because he was.
He watches with jealousy as one older half-brother becomes the first Muslim astronaut and another gains international renown for helping American journalists during the first Gulf War.
In more recent years, a rumor has spread that MBS was always his father's favorite.
And this is true now.
He's definitely, his dad has made him the crown prince.
It doesn't seem to have been true back then.
MBS himself told Karen House, I was, yeah.
If my kid, if one of them was an astronaut, I feel like no one would even ask what the favorite was.
I like the astronaut more.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's really tough to compete with easy.
Yeah.
MBS himself told Karen House, I was not my father's favorite, and then listed the names of four siblings that his dad preferred.
And the fact that he had a list ready to hand says a lot about this kid.
Where he's like, no, I knew my rank.
I knew my exact rank in the family.
They had it on the wall.
They had a letterboard.
Yeah, they had a letterboard and the astronaut was top.
One family associate postulated to house that, quote, he felt a need to strive for distinction from an early age.
This was stoked by his father, who treated his kids with his second wife like they were the B family, right?
You know, like this is the way that they're he's like almost saying this to them.
So MBS grows up with a bone to pick in regards to his half-siblings and a burning sense that he has a great deal to prove if he's going to win his father's affections.
This becomes more of an urgent need as he gets older.
By sixth grade, he's aged out of his shyness, and according to his recollections, he'd replaced his younger brother Turkey as the leader of his siblings.
One of the few good sources we have on his childhood that isn't either MBS himself or someone who he could imprison for having something negative said about him is a British tutor that his father hired to teach his sons English.
This guy, Rashid Sakai, had been a teacher at a fancy school in Jeddah before the prince called him up in 1996 when MBS was 11.
And he's one of our only sources who can be kind of objective about these kids in this period of time.
Here's how he describes the family living arrangements when he went to work with the family.
And keep in mind, these are poorer members of the royal family.
Once through the heavily guarded gates, the car would wind past a series of jaw-dropping villas with immaculate gardens maintained by workers in white uniforms.
There was a car park filled with a fleet of expensive luxury cars.
It was the first time I saw what looked like a pink Cadillac.
Oh my gosh.
That's his like, yeah, that's his second second family's house.
Right.
It's like when you read about Stephen Miller and you're like, his family had to downgrade.
And it's like, what do you mean by downgrade?
It's like, well, he still had maids and stuff and like servants.
Not as many.
But it wasn't as yeah.
Yeah, it was slightly smaller.
It was fewer maids than he thought he ought to have.
And that fucked him up for the rest of his life.
Yeah, he never got over that.
Yeah.
The Second Family and Luxury Cars00:15:10
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The sponsors of this podcast, who are probably not Stephen Miller.
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There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
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I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of The Girlfriends, oh my god, this is the same man.
A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
I felt like I got hit by a truck.
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The cops didn't seem to care.
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I vowed I will be his last target.
He's gonna get what he deserves.
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Every episode's a little different, but it all involves music and conversation with some of my favorite musicians.
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My dad gave me the best advice ever.
I went and had lunch with him one day, and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
I'm working my way up through, and I know it's a place they come look for up and coming talent.
He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
Yeah.
He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
And he's like, just give it a shot.
He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of luck.
Yeah.
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In 2023, former bachelor star Clayton Eckard found himself at the center of a paternity scandal.
The family court hearings that followed revealed glaring inconsistencies in her story.
This began a years-long court battle to prove the truth.
You doctored this particular test twice, Miss Owens, correct?
I doctored the test once.
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Sunlight's the greatest disinfectant.
They would uncover a disturbing pattern.
Two more men who'd been through the same thing.
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My mind was blown.
I'm Stephanie Young.
This is Love Trap.
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Ladies and gentlemen, breaking news at Americopa County as Laura Owens has been indicted on fraud charges.
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I've just looked, Stephen Miller is still not a podcaster, so we're doing good.
He's not a sponsor?
Not yet.
We do look forward to him sponsoring the show, though.
Yeah.
So we're talking about this guy, Rashid Sakai, who starts teaching when like the second family of Prince Salmon when MBS is 11.
And he recalled that when he starts working for the family, he notices that MBS is close to the palace director and the palace guards.
Like the people who are like the servants who are kind of running the household all really like this kid.
He tends to prefer, MBS tends to prefer socializing with the guards to paying attention during his English lessons.
Quote, as the oldest of his siblings, he seemed to be allowed to do as he pleased.
My ability to command the younger prince's attention would only last until Muhammad would turn up.
So again, he's not the top of his family, but he's the top of the second family.
So it's like, again, it's constantly the worst of all worlds, right?
Yeah.
Where he's the, he's the head of his small world, but he also regularly butts up against this other world where he's nothing, you know?
Since his dad lives in a different palace and is seldom around, this means that MBS is effectively the man of the house from like sixth grade on.
He is in charge in a very literal sense, and he gets to give orders to a staff of dozens of adults.
He develops a habit of playing pranks, as Rashid recollected.
I still have a memory of him using a walkie-talkie in our classes, borrowed from one of the guards.
He would use it to make cheeky remarks about me and crack jokes between his brothers and guards on the other end.
That's a very good prank.
That's not a prank at all.
It's just being a dick.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Again, a teacher should have the right to at least spray water at a kid if they do something like that.
A little bit of water.
Right, like just like a cat, like a cat.
Exactly.
Like, stab, stab.
They had to give him like some sort of special pass for this stuff.
Yeah.
Now, I'd be remiss if I didn't note that Sakai himself still says that he became fond of Muhammad and his siblings.
He describes them all as curious to learn but keen to play around, just like his non-royal students.
Sakai's account gives us an interesting insight into the bizarre world of royal family life.
For example, quote, on one occasion, I was taken aback when Muhammad told me that his mother, the princess, said that I had said that I seemed like a true gentleman.
I had no recollection of meeting her.
Saudi women royalty don't appear in front of strangers, and the only female I came across was a nanny from the Philippines.
I was oblivious to the fact that I was being watched until the future heir to the throne pointed to some CCTV cameras on the wall.
From that point onwards, I would always feel self-conscious in my lessons.
Like, that's the vibes here.
Oh, my God.
Just awful.
I think about what school teachers have to deal with in this country not being recorded.
Like, that is, oh, God.
No.
Yeah, just, just a bad time.
After several months on the job, the future King Salman, MBS's father, scheduled a meeting with all the different tutors that he'd hired for his children.
Sakai initially thought that this might be a good opportunity to discuss the kid's behavioral issues.
So we can infer that despite his fondness for Muhammad bin Salman, Sakai did consider the kid to have a behavior issue.
Quote, when he appeared before us, the teachers instinctively rose up and I watched in awe as they approached the Riyadh governor one by one, bowed, kissed his hand, and hastily conferred about the children and moved on.
And when my turn came, I couldn't for the life of me bin like they did.
I had never done it before.
And before I froze completely, I reached out to take the future king's hand and shook it firmly.
I remember a faint grin of amazement on his face.
However, he made no fuss about my faux pas.
Now, Sakai does not decide like I've already pushed my luck enough.
I'm not going to talk about the fact that your kid's acting up in class.
He says this is because he'd already decided to leave for the UK.
But he does recall that afterwards, the house manager yells at him for not showing respect for the future king, right?
That he's like, you shook his hand, you fucking asshole.
Yeah.
This is a job where you're like, I'm not going to marry Poppins.
This, I'm getting the hell out of here.
Like, I'm not free.
This is weird.
Yeah.
Yeah.
This can't be on me to figure this out.
It's that feeling of like, if you speak up, they might go like, well, I have a different plan.
We're just going to execute you.
Like, yeah, we're going to get you.
Get out of there.
We decided to go in a different direction.
Yeah.
By the time he enters his teen years, Prince Muhammad had jettisoned the shy, awkward side of his personality.
He continued to play pranks and act up in class and in public.
His relatives describe him as being frustrated and angry, with a sharp temper that went off explosively for little to no reason.
One of his earliest defining character traits is that he was completely unsatisfied with his family's level of wealth.
In the fourth grade, again, he's making about $500 a week as a fourth grader.
So we're talking about like a pretty good monthly income for a 10-year-old.
But he complains, again, about the fact that his other relatives get more.
Karen House describes the young prince as saying that his immediate family sat below the salt, right?
Like that's the term for we're not making as much money as the other people in the royal family.
It's hard normal.
If it's the only life you know, if you go to your cousins and you're like, I have all the pogs in the world.
And they're like, I have all the pogs in the world plus several cars.
And you're like, oh, yeah, I have custom pogs.
Yeah.
And again, like, by the time he's in high school, it's normal for princes at his level to have Porsches or BMWs, but that's not good enough for him.
He, like, he can't stand having the same kind of fancy car as the other poor princes.
I'm going to read a quote from the man who would be king here: As a high school senior, MBS was old enough to get his first car.
His father urged his son to get a car like the other boys had, luxury but low-key.
MBS declined.
He had saved money from gifts his uncles had given him on Islamic holidays, and he was going to have the car he wanted, even though it cost nearly $230,000.
So he buys the car, which is like a fancy Lamborghini, but he doesn't get a lot of time to show it off for long because I don't know.
This might be surprising to you, Dave.
16-year-olds are not ready to drive Lamborghinis.
I was literally, my mind was flashing through my history of cars as he was saying that.
I'm like, no, That's not what you want to do.
That's absolutely.
I don't care how much money you have.
Yeah.
You want something you'll drag race with your friend on the highway or off the roadway.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Give that kid a lancer.
Yeah.
MBS rear-ins some poor fucker in Riyadh and totals his Lamborghini.
He has to call a friend to be rescued.
I don't.
He's probably not drunk.
He's probably just incompetent.
I doubt the person he hits gets to file.
Imagine filing a claim against the fucking prince.
I wouldn't run.
Like I would literally on the street just see him and get the fuck out of there.
Yeah.
Holy shit.
Yeah, what a horrible time.
It's like hitting a cop car.
Like, fuck.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's like hitting a dinosaur.
He's just like, I need to get out of here right now.
That thing is going to kill me.
There's only one kind of dude driving a Lamborghini in Saudi Arabia right now.
Now, the turn of the millennium brings several huge changes to Muhammad bin Solomon's life, two of which bring a rapid and unexpected alteration to his chances at reaching the throne.
In 2001, Prince Solomon's oldest son, Fahd, the guy who'd helped reporters during Desert Storm, dies unexpectedly of a heart condition.
His second brother, Ahmed, who's 46, a year later, and like this is the guy he's like, owned a Kentucky Derby-winning horse.
He'd been great at shit.
He dies at age 44 of another heart-related issue.
In his biography, MBS, Ben Hubbard writes, The declared cause in both cases was heart attack, but the underlying reasons were never made clear.
Right.
So, were they poisoned?
Were they killed?
And I was heart attack in quotes.
Big heart attack in quotes.
Yeah.
It's a little soft, right?
Right.
That said, MBS probably wasn't the culprit either way because he's just a kid at this point in time.
It would be tough to live in a family like this and then there be an actual like genetic medical issue because you might not even know.
Like, what if it is just heart attacks and they're like, well, we assume they were poisoned.
So we're not going to look into that.
Not going to go to the cardiologist.
Yeah.
Who knows?
They're rich.
Are they doing like Coke or something like that?
I don't know.
This is mom orchestra.
Who's to say?
It's entirely possible these are what they seem to be.
Whatever the case, this shifts the family dynamics in very short order.
For one thing, MBS's dad, Prince Solomon, is devastated, as his and his most prominent biographers tend to agree, right?
This presents an opportunity to MBS because his dad has other older kids from his first marriage, but by the time the two oldest sons die, they're all mature adults following their careers and ambitions, while MBS is just 16 years old and has nowhere better to be during his father's time of need and vulnerability than right by his dad's side.
So while the other older kids are off doing stuff, MBS starts showing up to support his dad while he's grieving, which is going to immediately put him in a better position, right?
Yeah.
It's just, yeah, a smart play.
It's not hard to see why this pays dividends for him.
Yeah, and a convenient one where it might have even naturally happened where, like you said, everybody else is fucked off doing other things.
They don't seem like as interested in the family business, essentially.
Yeah.
Yeah, exactly.
Now, the main consequence of these deaths isn't just that two names get pulled from the front of the line.
It's that MBS and his dad get really close.
People note that Mohammed bin Salman starts following his father to work on a daily basis and gets to watch him do the job of governing the capital.
He starts to get a feel for how power works in the kingdom, and he gets a lot of FaceTime with his father.
Power players in the state apparatus get used to seeing MBS as well, and he becomes a default part of increasingly large bits of the power structure.
One thing he comes to understand is that his father wields power and influence within the Al-Saud family.
In his article for the Africa Report, Jihad Gillen writes, As governor of Riyadh, he had access to a small private prison where he could punish any badly behaved relatives for offenses such as public intoxication, unpaid hotel bills in Paris, and reckless driving.
I have several princes in my palace at this moment, he bragged to the British writer Robert Lacey.
In this way, his position meant that he knew all the secrets, big and small, of the Al Saud Al Saud clan and possessed incriminating information on many of them.
Cousin Jail and Working for Money00:07:30
Right?
So he's he's kind of able.
His dad is part of what MBS grows up seeing is his dad is padding his money and his is kind of increasing his power by punishing a lot of his relatives who have less power, right?
And MBS becomes aware of like, oh, that's how you get ahead in the family, you know, is by getting leverage and wealth over your loved ones.
It's like any family.
You blackmail the rest of your family.
Yeah.
Exactly.
Exactly.
You put them in the prison you keep for family members.
Yeah.
Exactly.
Everybody needs a cousin jail.
You need to need one.
If I had a cousin jail, believe me, it would have gotten used when I was a kid.
Oh, yeah.
Listen, here's the thing, Robert.
It can be a shed.
Like, it could be anything you need it to be.
It's ideally, you want like a, you know, like a 10-person cousin jail.
If you have a pair of handcuffs, you have a cousin jail.
Yeah.
Exactly.
Exactly.
If you have like a cinder block and some rope, you have a cousin jail.
Anyone can have a cousin jail.
So Ben Hubbard cites an interview with an anonymous member of the family entourage who claims, quote, MBS's social life centered around using his royal privilege to help build bonds with the people.
In the summer, his family would decamp for the Red Sea coast, where MBS would rent a fleet of jet skis for the young man, for the young men.
In the winter, they would set up camp across the desert, where MBS would have the biggest camp, serve roast lambs on huge platters of rice, and keep fleets of buggies for the Bedouin who dropped by to greet the locals.
In Ben's reading, one of bin Salman's strengths is that he loved, or at least was able to convince his father and a lot of power brokers in the country that he loved Saudi Arabia.
While his cousins and siblings and half-siblings loved the West and spent their time in foreign countries, he was primarily like hanging out at home, right?
This isn't totally accurate.
He parties overseas a lot and he violates the religious laws his family is supposed to abide by constantly.
But he puts in a good show of liking Saudi Arabia, right?
And that gets that pays dividends for him, you know?
Right.
I mean, he's a rich kid.
You have to party overseas.
That's just what you got to do.
Yeah, that's just part of the life.
Yeah.
Yeah.
But you throw in some parties at home, too, you know?
Yeah, no, they did it.
Yeah.
And this, the fact that this is a deliberate lie doesn't mean that his dad isn't convinced that his son feels this way.
The evidence suggests that MBS is able to keep a sort of Jekyll and Hyde situation going for most of his adolescence and young adulthood.
To his father, he's this disciplined, obedient, patriotic boy, the perfect successor.
To a lot of his peers and relatives, he makes a habit out of petty crime and disobedience, stretching the limits of his royal immunity as far as possible.
Per an article in the Africa report, quote, as a teenager, he was a bad-tempered troublemaker who sometimes behaved outlandishly.
Like the time he dressed up as a policeman so he could wander around a Riyadh shopping center.
He was caught in the act by actual police officers, but they let him walk free when they realized who he was.
He's doing a like a Princess Jasmine.
He's going out.
He wants to blend in.
But normally, when you want to blend in, you don't dress like a cop.
That's the opposite of blending in.
No, I mean, he doesn't want to blend in.
He wants to bully people.
Yeah, it sounds really like real.
My dad owns the dealership energy.
Yeah.
Where like he's he's a jerk, but he's a perfect angel to the family, to the people who are keeping him in that position.
Like he has to be good too.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Like he's doing a great job at being a shitty rich kid.
Like he's he's nailing it.
It sounds like that's exactly right.
You know, as a young man, one of the first revelations MBS has is that unlike many of his close relatives, he's going to have to work for his money.
Now, to be clear, he's not going to have to work to have access to life of luxury and excess.
He's guaranteed that as a member of the royal family.
But he wants power and influence, and his birthright isn't going to guarantee him that.
It's become increasingly clear to him by this period that Prince Solomon is in a lot of debt, both to other family members and to non-royal rich Saudi guys.
MBS is keenly aware of this fact, and he's also paying a lot of attention to the financial situations of his closer relatives.
During a conversation with one such cousin, he comes to the horrifying conclusion that his branch of the family is going to get left on the sidelines per an investigation by Jihad Gillen, published in the Africa Report.
Quote, while still a teenager, MBS told his father that he wanted to start a business, an atypical ambition for a Saudi royal family member, one that extracted nothing other than a smile from Solman.
MBS's significant relationships with his male relatives are all based around either vengeance or imitation.
As an insecure teenager, the cousin he most wants to imitate is his cousin Prince Al-Waheed bin Talal, who's the richest man in Saudi Arabia.
Reporting on bin Talal's earlier business dealings makes it seem like this is the kind of thing where MBS would regularly bring up his rich cousin during business deals to be like, I'll be richer than him in like two years.
You know, like, this guy's the cousin I most admire now, but I'm going to get more money than my cousin.
Like, you, you think he's rich now.
You get in bed with me.
I'm going to have even more money.
Right.
He's not initially good at business.
The first big business deal he tries to set up involves trying to buy, like trying to land a deal importing asphalt from Kuwait.
And this falls apart, as do most of his subsequent business deals, because despite having a lot of cunning and a work ethic that surpasses his relatives, he's not good at a lot of stuff.
By age 16.
Yeah, exactly.
Like, he doesn't know things.
I feel like being born into wealth, it feels harder to be into business because it's like, it's like it's like driving a GTA where like the stakes are not high enough for me to be good at this.
Yeah.
You know, if I, if I fuck up, yeah, it'll be fine.
It's like, and like if you get good at driving a GTA, that's fun, but you still fucked up enough that if you'd been a real person, you would have died a million times by that.
Yeah, exactly.
Exactly.
Yeah.
Case in point, at age 16, he saved up about $100,000 in cash, mostly from hawking gold, jewelry, and fancy washes.
He got his birthday gifts from his like dad and uncles.
And he uses that money to launch an investment portfolio that he's going to try to turn into a personal fortune, right?
He wants to turn this $100,000 into millions of dollars so that he's independently wealthy.
Gillen writes that, quote, at first, the value of his share portfolio went up, but soon enough, MBS was losing money and in financial ruin, as he would later admit.
Like he, he takes a bath on all of this money because he's basically day trading and he doesn't know what he's doing.
Right now, my greatest, yeah, of course.
The greatest advantage again, just stick that money in an index fund, man.
You'd have been fine.
Give it to me.
You're fine.
Just give the money to me.
Give the money to Dave.
It'll work out just as well for you.
Yeah.
The greatest advantage of being born into money is that a setback like burning your life savings at age 16 does not have any consequences.
You're not going to starve and you're not going to fail to meet any bills.
You're just going to have to keep saving up birthday Rolexes until you can try again.
So he does that and he graduates high school as one of the top 10 students in Saudi Arabia.
And I know you're wondering, did he really earn that honor or was it nepotism?
And the best answer I can give is this: Can you think of a real national education system that has a list of the 10 best students in the country?
No, because that's stupid.
Real countries don't do that.
Insider Trading and Bullet Threats00:09:56
No.
No, they don't.
You're right.
That's a good point.
Yeah.
I mean, it's almost like the 10 best students in America.
Yeah.
But it's like, what?
What is going to happen?
Is he not going to graduate?
There's no world where it's like, is he a good student or not?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Maybe he's smart.
We'll never know.
The guy whose teachers will get shot for not giving good grades has good grades.
News at 11.
Yeah.
Speaking of people who might get shot, probably not our advertisers.
I think.
Solid.
Solid.
Christmas.
Thank you.
There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
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My dad gave me the best advice ever.
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I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
I'm working my way up through and I know it's a place to come.
Look for up and coming talent.
He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
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If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
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Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of luck.
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And we're back.
So we're talking about Muhammad bin Salman.
He's graduated high school at this point.
He goes to college at a university named after his great-grandfather, King Saud.
I'm sure he earned his admittance the hard way.
And he gets a law degree.
He graduates second in his class, which again, I'm sure he did the honest way.
By this point, Mohammed bin Salman decided to take another stab at trying to get rich on his own.
He makes the smart move of finally reaching out to actual professionals, businessmen in Riyadh, who are scared of pissing off the governor and wouldn't tell his annoying kid to fuck off.
One imagines that Prince Salman puts in a good word with them on behalf of his son and perhaps maybe brings up some blackmail gently.
However, it happens, MBS winds up with $800,000 to try his hand at starting another investment portfolio, right?
Wow.
He managed to bootstrap himself up again to having even more money to try to make money with.
Amazing.
He invests in U.S. corporations and this goes better for him.
In 2008, when he's 23, he starts investing in the Tadalwu Exchange, which is the Saudi stock exchange, right?
Now, since nearly all of the companies on the Saudi exchange are owned or run by the government, aka his family, it's pretty easy for someone like MBS to do what we would call insider trading, which he would call calling his cousin who runs the company and says, hey, are you about to have any good news?
Should I get some stock now?
I'm surprised he even had to try.
It reminds me of the Stonecutter Simpsons episode where they're all just like Homer win, where it's like, do you even have to call?
Like, yeah, they could just.
Yeah.
Man.
And it's a remark.
It's a mark of how sketchy he still is at this, that he does get invested for insider trading.
And now nothing happens to him, but he's still obvious enough that someone looks into it.
Who looked into that?
That's incredible.
Yeah.
Like, you fucking bone saw.
That's who.
Right.
To do something so bad or illegal that someone's like, okay, this is going to kill me, but I have to do something about it.
Just can't ignore this, man.
Yeah.
Now, MBS's first years after graduation are a blizzard of firms and businesses launched by him, usually in partnership with someone who needed favors from his dad or the royal family.
Because he is somewhat willing to do real work, he does get appointed to some actual jobs.
Although, again, they're Nepo jobs.
He's made secretary general for the Riyadh Competitive Council.
He's made special advisor for a foundation named after his grandfather, that sort of stuff.
He creates his own philanthropic foundation, cultivating leadership skills in young Saudis.
He's got his little Abowski Urban Achievers program of his own, right?
And in 2009, he gets made special advisor to the governor of Riyadh, who is his dad.
Now, this is probably the earliest clear sign that this middle son of Prince Solomon had somehow engineered his way into being a favored son of the era parent.
This still puts him nowhere near the running for throne or for the like running the entire kingdom.
His focus at this point is just on getting rich.
Real estate speculation is finally how he succeeds financially in a big way.
Per that article in the Africa report, quote, MBS teamed up with landowners who agreed to give him a cut of the revenue generated by property sales to build developments on Greenfield estates.
The business model turned out to be lucrative, and the prince began to amass a small fortune.
Then a rumor made the rounds that MBS had sent an envelope containing a bullet to an owner who danged to refuse to sell a plot of land to him.
Whether true or false, the anecdote earned him the name Abu Rasala, the father of the bullet within the royal family.
That's the bullet.
That is cool.
Yeah.
I think that's just a complicated way of saying a gun, right?
Like a father of the bullet.
Is the gun the father of the bullet?
Is it more of a mother?
Because gun bullets are more like eggs in a gun.
Or they're like more guns.
So maybe they're not good at.
Yeah.
That's what H.R. Geiger would have argued per the painting on my wall.
Oh, yeah.
HR Geiger would have done all sorts of things.
It would have been both and none at the same time.
Yeah.
Oh, Geiger.
Oh, Geiger.
And again, that's also such like a.
That is kind of like a weak sauce version of threatening someone with murder is like just sending them an envelope with a bullet in somebody, because then there's something like I guess the thing about mailing someone a bullet is that then you get to imagine that they had to like go out, get some stamps, put the bullet in the envelope, mail the envelope, like.
There's just something like kind of silly about that threat where it's almost like too much work, I don't know.
King Solomon and Failed Succession00:04:01
Yeah yeah, it's.
It's just like kind of sweaty right like.
Yeah, it's like when you watch seven and you're like he had to mail that head, which means that he had to like go to UPS and like line and like get it all, get it all wrapped up, and I don't know.
It just kind of takes the edge off when you think about that a little too much.
Father's cool though, When you get mailed a bullet, do you call and be like, Do you mean to like shoot myself?
What am I to do with a bullet?
Did you mean to mail me a bullet?
Yeah, was this purposefully?
Were you sending this to an assassin?
Like, what are we doing here?
Yeah, it's sweaty.
It's very sweaty.
His masterstroke, like in terms of financial deals, is that this deal he inks in 2008 with Verizon.
Weirdly enough, that's how MBS gets his major financial success.
He takes a minority stake in a joint venture involved with one of his many companies to bring the fiber optic infrastructure to Saudi Arabia, right?
This partnership helps boost MBS's growing stature, although it doesn't actually get off the ground, right?
This is like his one of his big deals, and it never happens.
But he doesn't get paid for it.
And Prince Solomon is said to have bragged, My son made millions for the family as a result of this.
Even though, again, it doesn't work out, right?
Like, all that matters is we got paid, you know?
Well, fiber fiber optic, no fiber is like laser disc.
You know what I mean?
Where I feel like I was talking to someone, like, oh, I can't wait to get fiber optic.
And it's like, they don't, we have wireless internet now.
Like, we're completely skipping over fiber optic.
He's like that deadbeat dad who like promises his family we're getting fiber and then he just gets like faster dial-up.
Yeah, Saudi Arabia.
Yeah.
Hey, that works too.
Yeah.
In late January of 2015, King Abdullah died.
Uh, MBS's father, Governor Solomon, had been the crown prince for some period of time, and so he becomes the king after the old king's death.
This was noted as being an unusually smooth transition, given the messy circumstances of the Saudi family in general.
And the fact that this is smooth is seen as there's a kind of an agreement that now King Solomon and the old king had.
And basically, the former king is like, I will make you the king, but you have to appoint these people to positions in the government, right?
Who would otherwise be your rivals and agree not to fight them or have like bloodshed with them, right?
So they kind of make an agreement before the old king dies to try to spare the kingdom any sort of power struggles.
Saudi kings, as you might gather, don't have to follow a strict family line to decide who gets power when they're gone.
They get to pick a successor.
Salman gets the job because he convinces the old king he was the most capable option and he promises to do a bunch of stuff that the old king says.
Now, he doesn't follow all of these to the letter.
Before King Abdullah died, he had picked a crown prince that he wanted to be the crown prince for King Solomon, the guy who would succeed if Solomon died.
And this was Prince Murkin bin Abdulaziz, who at age 72 was just seven years younger than Prince now King Solomon.
I found a write-up by Stephen Matthews who noted, What was interesting about Prince Murkin becoming crowned prince is that he was officially designated in a royal decree by former King Abdullah as next in succession after King Solomon, after a further royal decree by King Abdullah stated that Prince Murkin would become crowned prince after crown prince Solomon became king and cannot be changed by anyone.
Now, this doesn't last, right?
And there's some speculation that because Murkin's mom was Yemeni, he was seen as an unacceptable heir.
I think that King Solomon just kind of knew the guy wasn't going to be a good successor.
He was too old.
And so after a few months, he picks a more capable successor.
And this guy kind of steps aside.
And the man he picks for the job is not his son, but his nephew Muhammad bin Nayef, otherwise known as Mbien, a very capable man who would have the misfortune of being the first person targeted for destruction by Muhammad bin Solman, who's going to succeed him as the crown prince.
Why Murkin Wasn't a Good Heir00:04:52
And we will tell that story in part three.
How are you feeling so far about this kid, Dave?
You know, no warning signs, no red flags.
Seems fine to me.
None at all.
I'm sure it'll go fine.
Yeah.
You know, nobody sawed, sawed up.
No.
Nobody's sawed up.
He's mailed a bullet to some guy.
I'm sure that's the worst thing he'll do.
Yeah, I mean, listen, that's like real teenage edge lord stuff where it's like, I can see someone doing that here.
I could see, yeah, like if you, you know, I don't know.
At least you're a free bullet, you know?
Yeah, that's how kind it was, I guess.
Yeah, you could sell that to like a child.
Child doesn't know how much a bullet costs.
They'll give you anything.
They don't know that that's not worth that much money.
Yeah.
Um, well, David, got any pluggles to plug before we roll out here?
Ah, same as before.
Gamefully Unemployed.
Some more news.
Google those things if you feel like it.
Yeah.
Google those things if you feel like it.
If you don't, still do it.
Yeah.
Blue sky, I guess.
Okay.
Okay.
Movie hooligan.
Why not?
I'm not really on it, but you know, I'm on it.
Yeah.
Anyway, find Dave on the internet.
Harass him on the internet.
Find him on the street.
Talk to him there.
Mail me a bullet.
Mail Dave a bullet.
If enough people mail me a bullet, I'll have a shitload of bullets.
That's right.
I have no guns, but those are as good as money.
You can pay your rent and bullets in some places.
You actually probably can't.
That might be illegal, but try paying your rent and no, they probably would take that as a threat.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, Dave, I think that's going to be all for those of us here at Behind the Bastards and those of us here at David Bell.
Until next week, continue not living in Saudi Arabia unless you live in Saudi Arabia, at which point, good luck.
In which case, good luck, I guess.
Either way, whatever.
Yeah.
And have fun.
Have fun.
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