The oil earnings flowing from the most profitable company in history are helping the Saudi kingdom shake up the global economy— and the old geopolitical order.
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FOR GENERATIONS, the city of Cannes in the South of France has been famous for its glitzy film festival, where the world’s movie stars strut down the red carpet every spring amid adoring fans and clicking cameras. But in March, another group of A-listers arrived on the red carpet, this time not from Hollywood, but from a country that until recently was shrouded in insular secrecy: Saudi Arabia.
Instead of movies, these visitors came to exhibit massive building projects whose budgets would make any studio boss salivate. In razzledazzle exhibition spaces erected along the palm-lined Mediterranean, the power players were there to woo investors and suppliers at a sprawling real estate convention. They aired videos of futuristic cities, skyscrapers, resorts, and jagged mountains, images that floated across giant wraparound screens. Alongside them were scale models of projects ranging from practical to fanciful, from a vast expansion of Riyadh, the Saudi capital, to a planned city of 9 million rising from scratch along the Red Sea—at a projected cost of more than $500 billion.
“Almost all the countries in the world are already built,” Saud Alsulaimani, Saudi country head for Chicago-based real estate services company Jones Lang LaSalle, told a group of convention-goers who dropped in to ogle the 3D models. “There is nowhere else on the planet you will find $1.4 trillion worth of construction at the same time.”
Though he wasn’t physically present in Cannes, you didn’t have to look far to catch Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, whose face was projected on the walls of the pavilion of the huge Saudi state-run real estate company. Just 38, MBS, as the prince is commonly known, is seven years into what’s envisioned as his lifetime leadership of Saudi Arabia (his father, King Salman, the official head of state, is 88). Since 2022, MBS has also held the post of prime minister. The largerthan-life image of MBS conveyed a message: The young ruler is the ulti- mate patron behind these ambitious projects.
Not displayed, however, was an equally crucial player: Saudi Aramco, the most profitable company in the world over the past decade. The state-owned energy giant pumps out oil at a rate no other single company can match—at margins that are the envy of every competitor. Its revenues, which reached $440 billion in 2023, make up about 40% of Saudi Arabia’s GDP. Its enormous earnings finance hundreds of billions of dollars’ wort
