Billionaires attending an investment conference in Miami hosted by Saudi Arabia were told of a 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 top executives of finance giants BlackRock, Citadel and many others as part of an annual effort to attract billions in new investment.
But Trump’s attendance, which was announced just days before the conference, underlined the importance of the kingdom 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 due to heavy security. Many passed the time by taking selfies with the president’s cost-cutting tsar Elon Musk.
Trump appeared at the conference just days after his envoys met Russian President Vladimir Putin’s foreign minister for talks in Riyadh aimed at ending the war in Ukraine. Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has close ties to both 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 at the Saudi conference shows ties between Washington and Riyadh remain firm as the president helps promote the kingdom’s economic development on a world stage.
“The speech of President Trump added so much 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 turn many away.
“I may have lost many friends in the last few 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 kingdom is no longer content to merely write cheques to US companies as 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 such as futuristic cities in the desert and bets on healthcare, artificial intelligence, sports, and advanced manufacturing.
“The kingdom is rightly saying we are beyond the suitcase form of relations,” said one executive affiliated with the government’s development efforts, referring to US investment firms’ practice of sporadically visiting Riyadh seeking cash to invest elsewhere.
“This is not the Saudi Arabia of 20 years ago . . . You need boots on the ground.”
The Trump family has a growing business with the kingdom, 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 up to proclaim their support for Saudi Arabia’s message.
On a panel, Robert Kapito, president of BlackRock, said the world’s largest investment manager was eager to beat its rivals in making Saudi Arabia an investment hub.
“This is the largest career alpha opportunity that I have ever seen,” said Kapito of Saudi Arabia’s development plans. “For those who are competitors of mine, we are building a big office and we are going to be there first.”
“[We] are all here to leap forward with the kingdom,” 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 first night of the event, Rumayyan, the head of the Public Investment Fund, hosted a private dinner at Miami’s Faena Hotel with a handpicked assortment of about 80 of the conference’s most powerful attendees.
Rumayyan travelled to Washington after the dinner to meet Trump at the White House to help broker a merger between PIF-backed LIV and the PGA Tour.
In his address at the conference, Trump repeated his claim that Zelenskyy was a “dictator,” a statement that has shocked many of America’s allies.
One executive said that while many 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 in the US but few references to Saudi Arabia’s economy. Last month, Saudi Arabia’s Prince Mohammed pledged to invest $600bn in the US over four years.
“I come today with a simple message for business leaders from all across the nation and all around the world . . . there’s no better place on earth than the current and future United States of America under a certain president named Donald J Trump,” he said.
Trump did not walk back his comments on emptying Gaza of Palestinians into bordering countries, a plan rejected by both Jordan and Saudi Arabia. The kingdom insists that a Palestinian state must be part of negotiations to normalise relations with Israel.
It was left to Trump’s Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff to try to explain 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 does not have “an eviction plan” for Palestinians in Gaza, “he wants to shake up everybody’s thinking”.
“[He’s] engendered discussion throughout the entire Arab world on different 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 “one of the most investable real estate marketplaces in the world as people begin to see the upside of what’s happening”.