What do you get for the man who has everything? Saudi Arabia’s ruler, Mohammed bin Salman, is said to have a $500 million yacht, a $450 million Leonardo painting and a $300 million French château. Now he’s acquired a new bauble: American golf. Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, or PIF, has negotiated a controlling interest in the main US golf tournament, the PGA Tour, merging it with a rival league the fund already owns, LIV Golf. There was an appalled reaction from Hatice Cengiz, fiancée of the murdered Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, who was allegedly killed on MbS’s orders. She called it “the worst face of sportswashing,” telling journalists: “It shows there are no limits to what money can buy.”
Sportswashing is part of something the Saudis have been doing for years — checkbook diplomacy — though now they have a lot more money to spare and are splashing it around much more aggressively. Sarah Leah Whitson, of Democracy for the Arab World Now, the organization founded by Khashoggi, told me the deal makes no sense in purely economic terms. “It’s really important to know how much of a premium the Saudis have paid,” she says. “This is a political move.” In fact, the FT estimates the Saudis will pump $3 billion into their new purchase. That translates into astonishing rewards for individual players. Some already on the Saudi payroll are reportedly getting $200 million a year.
But those who climb into bed with the Saudis are like Demi Moore in that terrible film Indecent Proposal. The money is too much to resist and so they take it, but end up feeling dirty. The PGA’s rationalizations sound especially desperate because only last year they invoked Saudi Arabia’s alleged role in 9/11 to stop players being poached by LIV. The PGA commissioner, Jay Monahan, implied that anyone who joined it was taking dirty money. “I would ask any player that has left… have you ever had to apologize for being a member of the PGA Tour?”
Now, deliciously, the 9/11 families are accusing him of “greed and hypocrisy,” accepting billions of dollars to “cleanse the Saudi reputation.” Monahan explained, lamely: “Circumstances do change.” He squirmed his way through an interview on the Golf Channel. “As we sit here today, you know, I, I think, I think it’s important to, you know, reiterate, that, um, I feel like the move that we’ve made, and how we move forward, is in the best interests of our sport.” Greg Norman, the former champion who runs LIV, has already “moved forward.” Asked last year about Khashoggi’s murder, the body dismembered with a bonesaw, he said: “Look, we’ve all made mistakes…”
It’s not just golfers. Soccer players are reportedly being paid more than $200 million a year to join the Saudi League. The PIF has bought stakes in entertainment, banking, technology, social media. It’s the largest shareholder in Nintendo, gave $3.5 billion to Uber when it was a start-up, has big pieces of Amazon, Facebook and Google — and owns Newcastle United. No doubt this is partly MbS’s wish to move the economy away from oil. But Whitson says that the kingdom’s billions have never been deployed “so strategically and pointedly” into western economies.
Most significant of all is the effort to buy up former government officials. A report in the Washington Post found that hundreds of high-ranking retired US military officers had gone to work for the Gulf monarchies, including a clutch of generals and admirals. There are similar claims about former bureaucrats and elected representatives. Whitson says: “It completely distorts the decision-making of people in office: they’re counting their future paychecks. Everybody has seen what Saudi Arabia’s rates are.”
The most famous recipient of Saudi largesse is Jared Kushner, President Trump’s son-in-law. Six months after leaving the White House, he got $2 billion for his new private equity firm. To make the payment, MbS overruled the PIF’s own advisory panel, which assessed the firm’s operations as “unsatisfactory in all aspects.” It’s possible, then, that Kushner didn’t get the money for his unrivaled financial genius but because of what he did for the Saudis in office.
Donald Trump is famously touchy about people cashing in on his name, at least without giving him a cut. So there is, naturally, a lot of speculation about whether he too might be doing business with the Saudis. Court documents have revealed that the Saudis own 93 percent of LIV Golf — and I have heard that Trump owns the other 7 percent. This may just be the usual Trump-related conspiracy theorizing, as there’s no hard evidence. That, however, isn’t surprising, as LIV’s finances are obscure, despite it appearing to have several billion dollars worth of share capital. The company, which has offices in London, couldn’t be reached.
Either way, Trump has benefited because LIV has chosen to play several matches at Trump golf clubs, with more to come. He greeted news of the Saudi takeover of the PGA Tour with the block capitals he used to reserve for bombing Syria or other triumphs. “GREAT NEWS FROM LIV GOLF. A BIG BEAUTIFUL, AND GLAMOROUS DEAL FOR THE WONDERFUL WORLD OF GOLF. CONGRATS TO ALL!!!”
All of this has emboldened MbS, who has been steadily creeping back into international favor since Khashoggi’s murder. More dissidents are being jailed. One woman, a PhD student at Leeds University, was given a thirty-four-year-sentence for publishing tweets calling for reform in Saudi Arabia.
It may be hypocritical to attack golfers while US and British policy is still to sell arms to Saudi Arabia. President Biden was forced to give MBS a humiliating fist bump at a meeting last year. Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia is making even more money, with sanctions on Russia continuing to affect oil supply. The PIF is said to be around $650 billion now. According to some estimates, it could be the world’s biggest state investment fund by the end of the decade, with $2 trillion. The Saudi spending spree will continue and it won’t be only the men in plaid trousers who face difficult moral choices.
This article was originally published in The Spectator’s UK magazine. Subscribe to the World edition here.
