MBS

“He was the admired figure, which gave him that sense of ‘I am in charge here,’” Sekkai said. “In that palace, he was the one that everybody looked after. He got the attention of everybody.”

MBS’s FATHER, SALMAN bin Abdulaziz, was a handsome, hardworking prince with jet black hair, a goatee, and a reputation for rectitude and toughness. When he traveled abroad, he sported suits with wide lapels and striped ties that invited comparisons to Wall Street bankers or characters from James Bond films. At home, he wore traditional, princely regalia and presided over the Saudi capital and surrounding areas as the governor of Riyadh. Residents joked that they could set their watches to the sight of his convoy heading to work in the morning, hours before other princes got out of bed. To run the capital, he kept tabs on the area’s tribes, clerics, and big clans—including his own. For years, he was the disciplinarian of the royal family. If a fight between royal cousins over a piece of real estate got out of hand, if a princess bailed on an astronomical hotel bill in Paris, if a prince got drunk and caused a scandal, it was Salman who would bring down the hammer, locking up egregious offenders in his own private jail.

“I have several princes in my prison at this moment,” he bragged to the British writer Robert Lacey. An American diplomat wrote that Salman had stopped one of his brothers from complaining about a new regulation by telling him to “shut up and get back to work.”

No one would play a greater role than Salman in propelling MBS’s rise.

Salman traversed the titanic changes that revolutionized life in Saudi Arabia during the 20th century. He was a scion of a dynasty that had twice failed to create a kingdom in central Arabia before succeeding so phenomenally that the desert-dwellers who had pioneered the idea would have had a hard time believing how it ended up.

In the mid-1700s, in a sunbaked oasis of mud houses and date palms, Salman’s ancestors had made the first attempt, when a chieftain named Mohammed Ibn Saud created the first Saudi proto-state around his home village of Diriyah. Mohammed was not from one of the major tribes that formed the primary social structure of Arabia at the time. Instead, the Al Saud were settled farmers who grew dates and invested in trade caravans.

Battles between tribes and clans were common, but Mohammed got an edge by forming an alliance with a fundamentalist cleric that underpinned how Arabia was ruled for generations to come. Sheikh Mohammed Ibn Abdul-Wahhab preached that Islam had been corrupted by traditional Arabian practices such as the veneration of idols and trees. He called for a purification of the religion by rooting out “innovations” and returning to the practices of the Prophet Muhammad and his companions centuries before. The sheikh’s views got him chased from his hometown, and he sought refuge in Diriyah, where the Al Saud bound his religious message to their political project.

The alliance benefited both parties. Backed by Ibn Abdul-Wahhab, the Al Saud were no longer just another Arabian clan out for power, but crusaders for the one true faith. In exchange, they gave the sheikh and his descendants control over religious and social affairs. The alliance proved to be potent, and as the first Saudi state grew, those communities that refused the sheikh’s message were branded infidels who deserved the sword.

When the state’s territory expanded to include the Islamic holy sites in Mecca and Medina, the Ottomans struck back by sending troops that toppled the state, reduced Diriyah to rubble, and scattered the surviving members of the Al Saud. Their descendants tried to reestablish the state in the 19th century in the nearby town of Riyadh, but the effort collapsed in infighting over who should be in charge.

In the early 20th century, a descendent of the Al Saud named Abdulaziz—MBS’s grandfather—revived the campaign to conquer the land of his forefathers. He led troops on camelback and reestablished the alliance with the descendants of Ibn Abdul-Wahhab, who provided religious justification for his rule. Over three decades, Abdulaziz brought much of Arabia under his control, ruling it from the new capital, Riyadh.

But the rise of this new, fundamentalist polity disconcerted the Western powers who were establishing themselves around the Persian Gulf, and King Abdulaziz faced a choice: to continue expansionary jihad, which would have invited conflict with the British, or to create a modern state. He chose the latter, and declared the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in 1932.

Saudi Arabia would most likely have remained a desert backwater of minor interest to the rest of the world had it not been for the discovery of oil in 1938. That attracted speculators, technicians, oil companies, and representatives of Western governments seeking access to the kingdom’s black gold, including the United States. In a secret meeting in 1945 between President Franklin D. Roosevelt and King Abdulaziz aboard an American warship in the Suez Canal, the two leaders hit it off, reaching a lasting agreement that guaranteed American access to Saudi oil in exchange for American protection from foreign attacks. That arrangement became a pillar of American policy in the Middle East into the next century.

The influx of oil wealth turbocharged the inheritances from the kingdom’s history. The Saudis financed the international propagation of Ibn Abdul-Wahhab’s teachings, making Wahhabism a global religious force. Saudi Aramco, the kingdom’s oil monopoly, became the world’s most valuable company—by far. The Al Saud became one of the world’s wealthiest dynasties. By the time of his death in 1953, King Abdulaziz had married at least eighteen women and fathered thirty-six sons and twenty-seven daughters. His offspring did not skimp on procreation either, expanding into a sprawling clan whose country bore their name and who enjoyed tremendous wealth and privilege.

There were thousands of them, all subsidized by the Saudi state. In 1996, an American diplomat visited the office that distributed their monthly stipends and found a stream of servants picking up their masters’ allowances, which varied based on their status. The sons and daughters of King Abdulaziz received up to $270,000, his grandchildren up to $27,000, and his great-grandchildren $13,000. The most distant relatives got $800. Princes also got million-dollar bonuses to build palaces when they got married, as well as perks for having children. The diplomat estimated that the stipends cost the state more than $2 billion per year, but that was merely a guess.

Much of that money trickled into society to earn the royals the loyalty of the population. One of Salman’s sons said he spent more than a million dollars of his own money during the holy month of Ramadan, hosting feasts for his subjects. But the royals still lived large, commanding fleets of yachts, building palaces from Los Angeles to Monaco, and taking foreign vacations so lavish that they caused economic booms in the communities where they landed.

The royals were so numerous that they formed a micro-society that functioned according to its own rules, including deep discretion and a respect for seniority so ingrained that they memorized one another’s birthdays. That is what allowed them to shuffle into line from oldest to youngest at functions with the ease of geese forming a V to fly south for the winter.

The mud walls and ramparts of Diriyah, the oasis where it all began, still stand a short drive from Riyadh—now a modern capital of 8 million people, studded with malls, skyscrapers, and broad motorways.

It was there that Salman spent his life—and prepared his son for the future.

SALMAN WAS BORN three years after the foundation of Saudi Arabia and would recall later in life that when he was a child, his family had still lived in tents for part of the year. But by the time he was a young man, oil wealth had transformed the royals into palace-dwellers and players on the world stage.

The family respect for seniority shaped how the kingdom was ruled. After King Abdulaziz died in 1953, rule passed to a succession of his sons, from oldest to youngest, with some brothers skipped over because they did not want to rule or because the rest of the family deemed them unfit. (Women had no political prospects.) Under the king, the country was run by senior princes who shared the main portfolios: internal security, the military, the National Guard, and foreign affairs. They made major decisions by consensus.

Salman was the twenty-fifth of his father’s thirty-six sons, which put him so low in the royal pecking order that, for most of his life, the prospect of his becoming king was remote. There were simply too many others ahead of him in line. Nor was he put in charge of a powerful ministry that he could use to promote his sons. Instead, in his twenties, he was named the governor of Riyadh Province, a job he would hold for nearly fifty years as the city grew from a desert outpost to a metropolis.

Running Riyadh made him a key interface between the royals and society. He maintained relations with the tribes and knew their genealogies, rivalries, and histories. Riyadh was the largest city in the Wahhabi heartland, the region of Najd, and Salman often hosted the clerics in his court. But Salman’s main job was receiving subjects who appealed for help. Those with ailing relatives sought money for operations. Businessmen solicited contracts. Farmers came for mediation in land conflicts. Families with sons on death row appealed for intercession to prevent beheadings.

Over the years, Salman fathered an impressive brood. His first wife, Sultana bint Turki Al Sudairi, hailed from a prominent family and bore him five sons and a daughter. The eldest, Fahd, attended universities in California and Arizona and got involved in British horseracing, which familiarized him with the West. After Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1990, Fahd spoke often with the Western reporters who flooded into the kingdom to cover the war.

The next son, Sultan, was a colonel in the Saudi Air Force who became the first Arab and the first Muslim to go to space, on the shuttle Discovery in 1985. He loved skiing, ran the kingdom’s tourism commission, and was so fond of the United States that he once told an American diplomat, “Some of the best days of my life were in the U.S.”

Next was Ahmed, who studied at the Colorado School of Mines and graduated from Wentworth Military Academy before also joining the Air Force. He later attended the University of California, Irvine, and served as the chairman of the family’s media company. In 2002, he caused a horseracing upset by buying the thoroughbred War Emblem for $900,000 three weeks before it won the Kentucky Derby. Acquaintances recalled him as “an elegant man with clipped mustache and pocket handkerchief, unexpectedly casual for a member of Saudi royalty.”

The next son, Abdulaziz, was a rare royal to work in the kingdom’s oil sector, where he championed efforts to modernize the industry and was later named energy minister.

The youngest of Sultana’s sons, Faisal, earned a PhD from Oxford, was a research fellow at Georgetown, founded a Saudi investment company, Jadwa, and also had a taste for thoroughbreds.

Salman’s first wife had one daughter, Hassa, who worked with the kingdom’s human rights commission and later ran into legal trouble in France after a plumber accused her of ordering her bodyguard to kill him.

At some point, Sultana developed a kidney ailment that worsened over time, leaving her surrounded by doctors and sending her frequently abroad for treatment. So Salman married Fahda bint Falah Al Hathleen, a short woman from a prominent tribe who would bear him six more sons. (Salman also had a short marriage to a third woman that produced one son, Saud.)

Fahda’s eldest son was Mohammed bin Salman, born August 31, 1985.

As a prince, MBS grew up steeped in inherited and unearned privilege, socializing in palaces, shuttled about in convoys, and fussed over by nannies, tutors, and retainers. Only close friends and relatives called him by his name. To everyone else, he was tal omrak, short for “May God prolong your life,” or “Your Royal Highness.” But if his father was far down the royal pecking order, MBS was even farther. As the sixth son of the twenty-fifth son of the founding king, there was little reason to expect that he would rise to prominence. And for most of his life, few people did.

MBS later said that his father oversaw the education of him and his siblings, assigning each child a book each week and then quizzing them on it. His mother brought in intellectuals to lead discussions and sent her children on educational field trips. Both parents were strict. Showing up late for lunch with his father was “a disaster.” 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 we made,” he said.

He later concluded that such scrutiny made him stronger.

MBS has rarely spoken publicly about his youth, nor have others who knew him at the time. That makes it hard to paint a detailed picture of his early life. Exacerbating the challenge is the power he would wield later, guaranteeing that public utterances about him would be complimentary and that anything scandalous would be buried. But to get a sense of where he came from, I have spent the last few years tracking down Saudis and others who knew or crossed paths with him in his youth. Most still live or have relatives or business in the kingdom and so spoke on condition of anonymity to protect themselves.

Salman lived with his first wife near the Royal Court in a palace with a white-columned façade; people jokingly called it “the White House.” MBS’s mother and her children lived elsewhere, but she had ambitions for them that could be achieved only through their father, so she packed them off frequently for lunch at “the White House” so they could be close to him. But MBS and his brothers were not warmly welcomed by Sultana, who looked down on the children of the second wife for their tribal background (and probably out of jealously toward their younger, healthier mother). She did not hide her contempt, which her children sometimes echoed, making fun of MBS while leading jet-setting lives and filling their résumés with businesses and foreign degrees.

MBS’s trajectory was profoundly different—largely domestic and deeply Saudi. But through his teens, he was mostly lost in the crowd of royals, with few obvious ways to elevate his standing. That would change because of two series of deaths in the family.

IN 2001, SALMAN’S oldest son, Fahd, who had helped out reporters during the Gulf War, died suddenly at age 46. A year later, his brother Ahmed, the Kentucky Derby winner, died, too, at age 44. The declared cause in both cases was heart attack, but the underlying reasons were never made clear.

The sudden, untimely deaths of two sons threw Salman into deep mourning. While his older children were off pursuing careers and taking care of their own families, MBS, then 16, stuck close to his father in his time of pain, deepening the bond between them. MBS’s mother pressed Salman to spend more time with MBS, and the young prince often shadowed his father as he ran the Saudi capital as governor. It was an immersive education in the state of the kingdom, as MBS saw who came and went, learning who mattered in which tribe, which clerics held which positions, which businessmen had tapped which parts of the economy, and which royals had found innovative ways to rip off the state.

One member of the family’s entourage during that time recalled that MBS’s social life centered around using his royal privilege to 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 men. In the winter, they would set up camp in 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 royals. MBS’s world was Saudi Arabia, and he seemed to love it as much as his cousins loved London, Geneva, or Monaco. His father appreciated his fondness for the kingdom, and their bond grew stronger, as MBS accompanied him at weddings and funerals and prayed near him at the mosque.

MBS’s mother and her children eventually moved into their own mansion, and some summers, Salman would vacation at a palace built by his brother, the late King Fahd, in Marbella with his first wife and her children, then pop in to see his second wife’s family in Barcelona. Later, MBS’s mother would take over a portion of the Hôtel Plaza Athénée in Paris, shunning its French cuisine for Saudi food prepared by cooks she brought from home.

In his teens, MBS developed a reputation for misbehaving. Fellow royals and others who knew him say he seemed frustrated and angry, erupting at times in fits of rage. At least once, he dressed up as a police officer and went to an outdoor mall area in Riyadh to show off. The actual police officers could do little because they knew he was the governor’s son.

Accompanying his father immersed MBS in contemporary Arabia, but he was also a son of the twenty-first century. As with many Saudis of his generation, his sense of the rest of the world was shaped by Hollywood movies, American and Japanese cartoons, and social media. Old friends said he would sometimes lose himself in videogames and was the first in his circle to become addicted to Facebook.

MBS was 16 when the hijackers dispatched by Osama bin Laden attacked the United States on September 11, 2001. He told a delegation of Americans years later that his mother had called him to see the news and he had reached the television just in time to watch the second plane crash into the south tower of the World Trade Center. While MBS did not want his comments during that meeting to be directly quoted, the delegation’s head, Joel. C. Rosenberg, told me his impression was that MBS recalled feeling a sense of horror that the world was going to hate Islam because of the attacks and that it would be harder for Saudis to feel comfortable abroad.

That feeling may have affected how he ruled later on.

“I think he grew up deciding,” Rosenberg told me, “‘I don’t want to live in a country that the world thinks of this way, and that I think of this way, and I’m going to hunt down anyone who could think up something like this or who could lead us to be perceived as a backward, crazy country.’”

Instead of going abroad for university, MBS stayed in Riyadh and studied law at King Saud University. One of his classmates said it appeared even then that he wanted to be a leader, directing discussions among friends and once telling a group that he wanted to be the next Alexander the Great. Another prince of the same generation would see MBS at weekly dinners their uncle, Prince Sultan, hosted for his nephews.

“He always talked about the government and how he wanted to get involved and what he wanted to change, but I thought he was just saying that because he was the son of the governor of Riyadh,” the prince recalled. “He always wanted to be the one speaking. He always wanted to be in the lead.”

He was also into Margaret Thatcher.

“He always enjoyed talking about the Iron Lady and how she enhanced the economic system of Great Britain,” the prince said.

But MBS remained far off the radars of the foreign diplomats and experts who studied royal dynamics to anticipate who might come to power in the future. In 2007, the American ambassador to Saudi Arabia visited Salman, who asked for help with U.S. visas for his family. His first wife had trouble traveling to see her doctor, and although Salman’s other children put up with the stringent application process, MBS “refused to go to the U.S. Embassy to be fingerprinted ‘like some criminal.’”

MBS graduated from university fourth in his class in 2007 and spent two years working for the Bureau of Experts, a research body for the Saudi Cabinet. After two years, he was due for a promotion but King Abdullah blocked it, so he returned to work for his father. He married a cousin, a petite princess named Sarah bint Mashour, and celebrated at a luxurious hall in Riyadh.

To outsiders, all Saudi royals appeared wealthy, but inside the family, there were vast gradations, and MBS was, yet again, far from the top. His father was well known, but MBS realized during his teens that compared to other senior royals his father had no fortune. As he moved into adulthood, the differences in wealth began to burn, as his cousins descended on European capitals with fleets of luxury cars and entourages that took over entire hotels. The cash wielded by some royals was mind-blowing, enabling them to vacuum up fancy homes and field house calls from Harrods salesmen with chests of jewelry for their wives and daughters. They gave thousand-dollar tips to bellboys, passed out $100,000 stacks of cash to their entourages if they happened to land near a casino, and could drop $400,000 on watches during a single shop visit.

Part of what the royals paid for was protection from public scrutiny of their lifestyles and spending habits, but details often leaked out. Marbella, on Spain’s Costa del Sol, was a favorite summertime destination, and royal cash drove a high-end economy. Some threw banquets with lamb, shellfish, and caviar that cost as much as $1,000 a head. Bloated hotel bills were further inflated with rented yachts, helicopters, and private jets. Most royals behaved well in public, but hospitality workers noted that many indulged pleasures in Spain that they had to forgo at home, such as alcohol, pork, and all-night parties.

“In the early hours of the morning, it appears the corridors of some hotels look more like catwalks for fashion models,” a local journalist wrote.

Sometimes, scandals drew attention to royal excesses. One princess, Maha al-Sudairi, left behind nearly $20 million in unpaid bills in Paris, including nearly $400,000 to a luxury car service and $100,000 to a lingerie store. Three years later, she was back and tried to slip away without paying a $7 million bill at the Shangri-La Hotel, where she and her entourage had occupied forty-one rooms for five months. The next year, her son celebrated his graduation by booking entire sections of Disneyland Paris, where his dozens of guests were entertained by rare Disney characters. The bill for the three-day blowout came to $19.5 million.

MBS didn’t have that kind of money, but he began playing the Saudi stock market as a teenager. Once he entered his twenties, he dabbled in business to build his wealth.

Real estate had long been an easy way to generate princely wealth, and MBS tried that, too. MBS clearly managed to make some money. A retired diplomat recalled asking a luxury car dealer around 2011 about the market for high-end rides.

The dealer broke it down.

The lower princes bought Porsches or BMWs.

The next level up got Maseratis or Ferraris.

The big spenders purchased Bugattis, which cost a few million dollars each.

“Who buys those?” the diplomat asked.

“I just sold one to this guy called Mohammed bin Salman,” the dealer said.

The diplomat had never heard of him.

“He’s the governor’s kid.”

But during MBS’s mid-twenties, there was still little reason to expect that he would become more than a middling prince who dabbled in business and pitched up abroad now and then for a fancy vacation. Then a second series of deaths in the family vaulted his father up the ladder—and MBS with him.

IN JULY 2011, Salman’s first wife lost her long battle with kidney disease and passed away. His full brother, Prince Sultan, who was next in line to the throne, suffered from cancer, and Salman stayed with him in New York until he died later that year. Another brother, Prince Nayef, became the crown prince, but he had coronary heart disease and died in 2012. King Abdullah then named Salman the new crown prince, and suddenly MBS’s father was next in line to the throne and well positioned to empower his favorite son.

MBS has never publicly discussed when he began plotting his political career, but he has talked about his desire to be a new kind of ruler, one who disrupted the old order like the giants of Silicon Valley, instead of one who followed the traditional ways.