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The Stockholder in the Sand

By William D. Cohan
March 21, 2013

http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2013/03/myth-prince-alwaleed-bin-talal-saudi

Worth an estimated $27 billion, the enigmatic Prince Alwaleed bin Talal has very public holdings: he is the second-largest voting shareholder in News Corp., he owns Paris’s George V hotel and part of New York City’s Plaza hotel, he is a stockholder in Apple, and he will soon own the world’s tallest building. But the private origins—and exact size—of his massive fortune are the subject of continued debate between bin Talal and prominent media outlets. So what’s the truth? And does one of the richest men on Bloomberg’s Billionaire Index—a calorie-counting cell-phone addict who loves texting James Murdoch—really spend his free time throwing dwarves?


Maybe because stories about dwarf-tossing at his desert encampments became public, Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, the 58-year-old Saudi Arabian financial, media, and real-estate mogul, no longer invites journalists to visit his $130 million, 460,000-square-foot Riyadh complex with 371 rooms, an 80-foot-high entrance hall, 500 televisions, and a staff of 100.

The prince has traditionally been proud to show off his immense wealth, but he has also worked hard to become the Western face of Saudi finance, and slinging dwarves around like so much hash would not go down too well with a First World audience. One of the largest shareholders in Citigroup, the second-largest voting shareholder in News Corporation after the Murdoch family, and with major stakes in dozens of other Western companies, he travels the globe often wearing bespoke suits instead of the traditional Saudi thawb. Based in a country where women can’t drive or vote, he champions women’s rights and discourages his female employees, who make up 65 percent of his workforce, from wearing the veil in his offices.

So it didn’t quite fit the image he was trying to convey when Business Insider broke the dwarf-throwing story in January 2012. The source was a former American employee of Alwaleed’s (who was also a friend of Alwaleed’s 35-year-old son, Khaled). The prince’s defenders hastened to put it all into context: dwarves are outcasts in Saudi Arabia; when they come begging, Alwaleed, in his great beneficence, hires them to be a roving band of court jesters, thus instilling in them “a work ethic, and you really can’t fault that.”

In Saudi Arabia the wealthy think it is lucky to have dwarves around, and the dwarves enjoy it, “kind of like a circus situation.” When they are pressed into service as human projectiles, there are pillows to catch them. Pillows are obviously moot, however, when Alwaleed has the dwarves dive for $100 bills in bonfires, as the Business Insider story also alleged. Talk about occupational hazards! “It’s all lies,” Alwaleed told me emphatically during our first meeting at the Plaza hotel, in February 2012. He said the story was taken down “the next day,” although it still lives online.

Even in the face of such unflattering media stories, the prince is not exactly press-shy these days, and when he wants to meet with a journalist he can commandeer the magnificent gallery inside Paris’s historic George V hotel or a large chunk of the lobby of New York’s Plaza hotel. After all, he owns the George V lock, stock, and barrel, having spent $175 million to acquire it and another $125 million to renovate it into a state of dazzling luxe perfection. Alwaleed, it seems, loves to rescue not just dwarves but also hotels, banks, assorted companies, and even fellow moguls who have fallen on hard times.

Over the last two decades, he has swooped in with tons of cash to aid various companies and superstars at their low points, including London’s Canary Wharf, Citigroup, EuroDisney, Apple, Donna Karan (the company), and Michael Jackson, to name but a few. On the day of our second meeting, in late April 2012, the prince was clutching a small string of prayer beads as he talked about News Corp. chairman Rupert Murdoch and Citigroup’s then C.E.O., Vikram Pandit.


The ties between Alwaleed and Murdoch run deep. Alwaleed owns 56.2 million shares of Murdoch’s News Corporation; News Corporation, in turn, owns a 19.9 percent stake, worth around $150 million, in Rotana, Alwaleed’s privately held pan-Arab media conglomerate, based in Bahrain. As much of the world knows by now, last year was not a good year for Murdoch. Due to a phone-hacking investigation into his British newspapers, he was forced to close the major London tabloid News of the World, abandon his bid for control of the satellite network BSkyB, shunt aside his younger son and heir apparent, James, and testify before Parliament about the company’s abuses of power. Some 32 people, most of them former and current News Corp. employees, have been arrested since the phone-hacking scandal was uncovered..........................

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I read about that prince. He is quite a character.