Prince Alwaleed bin Talal: The billionaire royal

Zing Tsjeng (0:07)

March 2013, a copy of Forbes magazine lands on a marble desk in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.

Simon Jack (0:12)

It contains that year's Forbes Billionaires List, well known to us, the magazine's annual ranking of the world's richest people.

Zing Tsjeng (0:19)

A Saudi prince eagerly flips through the pages before stopping at a picture of himself in his trademark tinted glasses and traditional headdress.

Simon Jack (0:27)

The Forbes List says the prince has a net worth in the region of $20 billion, making him the 26th most wealthy person on the planet.

Zing Tsjeng (0:36)

But the prince is furious. As far as he's concerned, the magazine has undervalued him by around $10 billion. I mean, how dare they?

Simon Jack (0:43)

There's only one thing for it. The prince quietly instructs his lawyers to sue Forbes magazine for libel.

Zing Tsjeng (0:51)

Welcome to Good Bad Billionaire from the BBC World Service. Each episode we pick a billionaire and we find out how they made their money.

Simon Jack (0:57)

We take them from zero to their first million and then from a million on to a billion.

Zing Tsjeng (1:02)

My name is Zing Tseng and I'm a journalist, author and podcaster.

Simon Jack (1:04)

And I'm Simon Jack. I'm the BBC's business editor.

Zing Tsjeng (1:07)

This week's billionaire is Prince Alwaleed bin Talal bin Abdullah Aziz Al Saud.

Simon Jack (1:12)

Or just Prince Alwaleed bin Talal for short.

Zing Tsjeng (1:14)

Or Prince Alwaleed for even shorter.

Simon Jack (1:16)

Yes, widely recognised as Saudi Arabia's richest royal, Alwaleed claims very little of his fortune came from inheritance or indeed the country's vast oil wealth.

Zing Tsjeng (1:26)

You can decide that for yourself. Instead, he's earned a reputation as one of the canniest investors on the planet, styling himself as the Warren Buffett of Arabia.

Simon Jack (1:34)

That's because Prince Alwaleed has built a vast fortune by placing high stakes bets on huge global companies. But as every gambler knows, not all bets pay off.

Zing Tsjeng (1:44)

Prince Alwaleed has an incredibly opulent lifestyle to match. We're talking lavish palaces, private zoos, mega yachts. He even has a golden throne installed on his private Boeing 747

Simon Jack (1:56)

He's a member of the House of Saud, one of the most powerful royal families in the world. But for our money, he's also a pretty unusual one.

Zing Tsjeng (2:03)

So let's sit on the golden throne and fasten our seatbelts as we fly back to where it all started for Prince Alwaleed bin Talal.

Simon Jack (2:15)

Alwaleed was born in 1955 in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia's second largest city after the capital Riyadh.

Zing Tsjeng (2:21)

Back then, Saudi Arabia was still a relatively young country, founded just over two decades earlier by the prince's grandfather, King Abdul Aziz. Its economy was only beginning to be transformed by the discovery and exploitation of oil.

Simon Jack (2:34)

But it was also ultra conservative, rooted in religion and politically dominated by the royal family.

Zing Tsjeng (2:40)

And we can't talk about Saudi Arabia without talking about its human rights record, because even though the kingdom has become much more socially open in recent years, last year Saudi Arabia still executed the highest number of people in any given year. Authorities continue to severely restrict freedom of expression and women face widespread discrimination. And the Saudi government has been accused of using investments in international sports and entertainment, known as sports washing, to whitewash its human rights record and improve its global image.

Simon Jack (3:09)

However, when defending Saudi Arabia's right to host the 2034 World Cup, Saudi Arabia's sports minister said the claims of sports washing are, quote, very shallow, adding a lot of the people that accuse us of that haven't been to Saudi or seen what we're doing here. But let's get back to Prince Alwaleed's beginnings. His father, Prince Talal, wasn't liberal in the Western sense. He was one of Saudi's most prominent voices for reform, in fact. Branded the Red Prince, he advocated constitutional government, greater social openness, more opportunities for women, ideas that seemed distinctly radical there at the time and led him to being politically sidelined.

Zing Tsjeng (3:46)

Prince Alwaleed's mother, Mona al-Sol, was the daughter of Lebanon's first prime minister, but she and Prince Talal divorced when Alwaleed was young. Now, this meant that the prince spent much of his childhood moving between Saudi and Lebanon, between different homes, cultures. It might even be said different expectations.

Simon Jack (4:03)

The story goes that Alwaleed was a restless child with an annoying habit of running away for days at a time. And after repeatedly getting into trouble at school in Lebanon, his father took the young prince back to Saudi, where he enrolled him in a military academy.