Billionaires attending an investment conference in Miami hosted by Saudi Arabia were told of a brand new dawn of co-operation between the oil-rich kingdom and the US in an hour-long address by US President Donald Trump.
Yasir al-Rumayyan, governor of Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund, hosted the highest executives of finance giants BlackRock, Citadel and lots of others as a part of an annual effort to draw billions in recent investment.
But Trump’s attendance, which was announced just days before the conference, underlined the importance of the dominion to the president and his inner circle.
Moguls including Leonard Blavatnik, Sir Martin Sorrell and Marcelo Claure waited hours for an audience with the star speaker as a consequence of heavy security. Many passed the time by taking selfies with the president’s cost-cutting tsar Elon Musk.
Trump appeared on the conference just days after his envoys met Russian President Vladimir Putin’s foreign minister for talks in Riyadh geared toward ending the war in Ukraine. Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has close ties to each leaders, and Riyadh has previously helped negotiate a US-Russia prisoner swap.
The exclusion of Ukraine from those talks has fractured US relations with Europe. But Trump’s presence on the Saudi conference shows ties between Washington and Riyadh remain firm because the president helps promote the dominion’s economic development on a world stage.
“The speech of President Trump added a lot value to this,” said Rumayyan.
Richard Attias, chief executive of the event, titled Future Investment Initiative Priority Miami, said Trump’s attendance caused a late surge in interest from business leaders that forced him to show many away.
“I could have lost many friends in the previous couple of days,” Attias said.
The FII event was hosted at a ritzy beachfront Miami hotel, confirming a recent change in tone from Saudi Arabia to US investors. The dominion isn’t any longer content to merely write cheques to US corporations because it focuses more on its hugely ambitious domestic development plans. It now demands they open offices in Saudi Arabia or provide capital for its mega projects reminiscent of futuristic cities within the desert and bets on healthcare, artificial intelligence, sports, and advanced manufacturing.
“The dominion is rightly saying we’re beyond the suitcase type of relations,” said one executive affiliated with the federal government’s development efforts, referring to US investment firms’ practice of sporadically visiting Riyadh searching for money to take a position elsewhere.
“This is just not the Saudi Arabia of 20 years ago . . . You wish boots on the bottom.”
The Trump family has a growing business with the dominion, which has invested $2bn with the private equity fund of Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law. The LIV golf tour owned by the Public Investment Fund hosts events at multiple Trump-owned golf courses.
Executives at Wall Street firms lined as much as proclaim their support for Saudi Arabia’s message.
On a panel, Robert Kapito, president of BlackRock, said the world’s largest investment manager was desirous to beat its rivals in making Saudi Arabia an investment hub.
“That is the biggest profession alpha opportunity that I actually have ever seen,” said Kapito of Saudi Arabia’s development plans. “For individuals who are competitors of mine, we’re constructing an enormous office and we’re going to be there first.”
“[We] are all here to step forward with the dominion,” proclaimed private equity billionaire Robert Smith of Vista Equity Partners.
But few firms have large-scale investment operations in Saudi Arabia, with many holding small offices mostly focused on fundraising.
On the primary night of the event, Rumayyan, the top of the Public Investment Fund, hosted a non-public dinner at Miami’s Faena Hotel with a handpicked assortment of about 80 of the conference’s strongest attendees.
Rumayyan travelled to Washington after the dinner to satisfy Trump on the White House to assist broker a merger between PIF-backed LIV and the PGA Tour.
In his address on the conference, Trump repeated his claim that Zelenskyy was a “dictator,” a press release that has shocked a lot of America’s allies.
One executive said that while a lot of Trump’s claims were half-truths the audience cheered, underscoring that few business leaders have the appetite to publicly challenge the president’s most controversial policies on trade, immigration, and Russia’s war in Ukraine.
Trump made a vociferous appeal for investment within the US but few references to Saudi Arabia’s economy. Last month, Saudi Arabia’s Prince Mohammed pledged to take a position $600bn within the US over 4 years.
“I come today with a straightforward message for business leaders from all across the nation and all all over the world . . . there’s no higher place on earth than the present and future United States of America under a certain president named Donald J Trump,” he said.
Trump didn’t walk back his comments on emptying Gaza of Palestinians into bordering countries, a plan rejected by each Jordan and Saudi Arabia. The dominion insists that a Palestinian state should be a part of negotiations to normalise relations with Israel.
It was left to Trump’s Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff to try to clarify the US plan on a panel with Jared Kushner to an audience that included top Saudi figures including ambassador to the US Princess Reema bint Bandar al-Saud.
Witkoff said that while the president doesn’t have “an eviction plan” for Palestinians in Gaza, “he desires to shake up everybody’s pondering”.
“[He’s] engendered discussion throughout the whole Arab world on several types of solutions that before he talked about [them] people would have never considered,” he said.
Witkoff, a property mogul like Trump, called Saudi Arabia “some of the investable real estate marketplaces on the earth as people begin to see the upside of what’s happening”.
