Prince Alwaleed bin Talal Al Saud is the founder of Kingdom Holding, a conglomerate that has stakes in hotels, real estate and equities. The Riyadh-based group's investments include Citigroup, Snap and Lyft. He also has shares in social media platform X, and a stake in Middle East film and entertainment company Rotana.
Alwaleed's most valuable asset is a 78% stake in publicly traded Kingdom Holding. His stake is down from 95% after he sold 625 million shares to Saudi Arabia's sovereign wealth fund, the Public Investment Fund, in May 2022 for $1.5 billion.
Upon his release from detention during Saudi Arabia?s corruption crackdown, Alwaleed made an arrangement with the Saudi government. In a March 2018 interview, he said the confidential agreement is a "confirmed understanding, going forward" and wouldn't elaborate. A representative for Alwaleed disputes media reports that he made substantial payments to the Saudi authorities. No payments are reflected in the calculation since none are confirmed to have been made.
Alwaleed owns land in and around Riyadh, a 420-room palace, the top three floors of Kingdom Tower, and other Saudi residences that he values at $4.09 billion. A 10% liquidity discount is applied to his figure to account for a lack of market transparency and a limited pool of potential buyers.
He also has a majority stake in media company Rotana. Other than publicly listed assets, most of his other assets are closely held and included on the basis of ?fair market? valuations provided by Alwaleed as of Oct. 9, 2023.
He values his stakes in companies throughout the Middle East at $260 million and investments outside of the region -- including shares in public companies such as Citigroup and JD.com -- at $214 million. He also directly owns 21.2 million shares of Snapchat.
He personally owned 30.1 million shares of Twitter, now called X, before it was taken private by Elon Musk in October 2022. Alwaleed maintained his stake after the sale. Its valued based on the Jan. 31, 2024 price used by Twitter investor Fidelity Blue Chip Growth Fund.
He declined to provide full details about his equity holdings, most of which couldn't be verified because he holds less than 5% of the companies.
The self-proclaimed Warren Buffett of Arabia is one of the most public members of the Saudi royal family. The prince is the son of Prince Talal and Princess Mona El-Solh, daughter of Lebanon's first prime minister, Riad El Sohl. He is also a nephew of the late Saudi ruler, King Abdullah. Alwaleed split time between Saudi Arabia and Lebanon while growing up.
He moved to the US to study business at Menlo College in California in 1975. He returned to Saudi Arabia after graduating and began investing in real estate with a $30,000 loan from his father. In his biography, "Alwaleed: Billionaire, Businessman, Prince," Alwaleed said he made his first billion dollars selling land and serving as a point man for multinational companies angling for local contracts.
He drew attention from the international investing community in 1991, when he invested $590 million in Citibank. He went on to invest in many publicly traded US companies, including News Corp., Disney and Apple. He often invests personally alongside his publicly traded conglomerate, Kingdom Holding.
Alwaleed has accumulated an empire of luxury hotel properties. Today, he owns stakes in London's Savoy Hotel, the George V hotel in Paris and the Four Seasons hotel group. Famous for his eccentric, high-cost lifestyle, Alwaleed and his entourage travel on a Boeing 747 retrofitted with two bedrooms and a dining room that seats 14. When in Saudi Arabia, he lives in his 420-room, 370,000-square-foot palace in Riyadh.
On Nov. 4, 2017, Alwaleed was targeted in an anti-corruption crackdown spearheaded by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. He was detained alongside dozens of other Saudi businessmen at the Ritz-Carlton hotel in Riyadh. After his release in January 2018, Alwaleed described his detention as a "misunderstanding" between him and the government and maintained his innocence of any charges. Saudi Arabia's attorney general has said the kingdom has collected more than $100 billion in cash and other assets from detainees.