Mohammed bin Salman: The Prince Who Rewrote Saudi Arabia
In November 2017 roughly two hundred of the richest and best-connected men in Saudi Arabia were driven to the Ritz-Carlton in Riyadh and held there — among them Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal, a major shareholder in Citigroup and News Corp, the head of the National Guard, the economy minister and a navy commander. Saudi authorities said $300–400 billion was linked to corruption; US officials later described the methods as "coercion, abuse, and torture," and seventeen detainees were hospitalised. In a single night, the thirty-two-year-old crown prince ended eight decades of rule by family consensus.
The Seventh Son
Mohammed bin Salman Al Saud was born on 31 August 1985 in Riyadh, the seventh son of Salman bin Abdulaziz and the eldest child of Salman's third wife, Fahda bint Falah Al Hithlain. He had no obvious claim on power: the succession had passed laterally among the sons of the founding king, and Mohammed was one grandson among hundreds. He took a law degree at King Saud University, graduating second in his class — notable in a royal house whose princes were typically educated abroad — and worked in the private sector and as secretary-general of the Riyadh Competitive Council.
In December 2009, aged twenty-four, he became special adviser to his father, then governor of Riyadh Province, and in 2011 founded the MiSK Foundation for youth leadership. He married Sara bint Mashour Al Saud in 2008; they have five children.
Five Years to the Top
The ascent, once it began, was almost vertical. On 2 March 2013 he was made chief of the Crown Prince Court with ministerial rank. In April 2014 he became a minister of state. On 23 January 2015, the day King Abdullah died and his father took the throne, he was appointed Minister of Defence and secretary-general of the Royal Court. By April 2015 he was deputy crown prince. On 21 June 2017 King Salman deposed Muhammad bin Nayef — the interior minister and America's preferred partner — and installed his son as crown prince. Bin Nayef was arrested in March 2020 on treason charges, alongside the king's own brother Ahmed bin Abdulaziz, over an alleged coup plot. On 27 September 2022 Mohammed was named prime minister, a title Saudi kings had always kept for themselves.
Vision 2030
The programme announced in April 2016 was the most ambitious restructuring ever attempted by an oil monarchy: diversify away from crude into technology, tourism, entertainment and sport; grow the Public Investment Fund toward a $2 trillion target; float part of Saudi Aramco to capitalise it. Some of it is concrete — the $6.7 billion Haramain high-speed railway between Mecca and Medina opened in October 2018, carrying up to 60 million passengers a year at 300 km/h.
Much of it is not. NEOM, announced in October 2017 as a 26,000-square-kilometre linear city on the Red Sea, has been scaled back sharply; an internal audit reportedly found evidence of deliberate manipulation, new contracts dried up by 2025, and the project went unmentioned in the 2026 pre-budget statement. Members of the Howeitat tribe were forcibly expelled from its footprint. *The Economist* called the Aramco listing "a mess." A decade on, the Saudi economy remains heavily reliant on oil.
The Opening
The social liberalisation was real and fast. The religious police lost their powers of pursuit, arrest and detention in 2016. The ban on women driving was lifted in September 2017 and implemented in June 2018. Women over twenty-one gained the right to a passport and foreign travel without a male guardian; from February 2018 they could open businesses without male permission; from March 2018 divorced mothers kept immediate custody. Women entered a Jeddah stadium in January 2018; the first public cinema in thirty-five years opened that April. Flogging was abolished in 2020, as were executions for crimes committed as minors. In 2021 he ordered Saudi law codified, ending the discretion of individual judges to apply their own reading of sharia.
The Costs
The same period was among the most repressive in the kingdom's modern history. In March 2015 he launched the Saudi-led intervention in Yemen; by mid-2019 an estimated 85,000 Yemeni children had died of starvation, a famine widely attributed to the coalition's campaign and blockade, with 12 to 13 million people at risk by October 2018. In June 2018, weeks before the driving ban lifted, seventeen women's rights activists were arrested, among them Loujain al-Hathloul, whose family alleged she was whipped, beaten, electrocuted and sexually harassed, and offered release if she would deny it on camera. She refused. On 23 April 2019 the kingdom executed thirty-seven people, mostly Shia activists, in one of the largest mass executions of a minority sect in its history.
Then there was Jamal Khashoggi, the *Washington Post* columnist murdered in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul on 2 October 2018. A declassified US intelligence assessment released in February 2021 concluded that Mohammed had approved the operation. He has always denied it. A US court dismissed a civil case in November 2022 after granting him head-of-government immunity — an immunity he acquired two months earlier by being made prime minister.
He also blockaded Qatar from June 2017, dismissing it as "smaller than a Cairo street"; compelled Lebanon's prime minister Saad Hariri to resign during a Riyadh visit that November; and expelled Canada's ambassador in August 2018 for criticising Saudi human rights.
The Indispensable Man
Isolation did not last. Putin publicly embraced him after Khashoggi. China became the kingdom's largest economic partner, trade rising from $51.5 billion in 2017 to $87.5 billion in 2021, with a comprehensive strategic partnership signed during Xi Jinping's December 2022 visit. He hosted Zelenskyy in Riyadh in March 2025; Trump made Saudi Arabia the first stop of his second term in May 2025. On Israel he has held the line publicly since Gaza, calling the campaign "collective genocide" in November 2024 and refusing normalisation absent a Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital. In 2026 he was reported to have privately urged Trump to strike Iran.
Why Mohammed Is Called a Genius
The quality involved is not intellectual originality but an unusually accurate reading of power — who holds it, what it rests on, and how fast it can be taken before the system reacts. Between 2013 and 2017 he went from an unremarkable prince among hundreds to sole effective ruler by neutralising every rival node at once: the National Guard, the interior ministry, the merchant elite, the clergy. The Ritz-Carlton operation was not merely brutal; it was structurally precise, collapsing three security fiefdoms and eighty years of family consensus in a single night. Vision 2030 applied the same instinct outward — he grasped before his peers that oil monarchies had a finite political runway, and that legitimacy could be repurchased from a young population with cinemas and jobs rather than clerical approval.
The counter-case is not simply that he is ruthless; it is that much of the vision has not worked. NEOM, the flagship, has been quietly gutted. Aramco's flotation disappointed. The economy remains oil-dependent. Yemen cost tens of billions and tens of thousands of children's lives without removing the Houthis. Khashoggi's murder, which US intelligence says he approved, was a self-inflicted wound of staggering clumsiness for a man supposedly playing a long game. Reform delivered by decree, with the activists who campaigned for it jailed, demonstrates control rather than statecraft. What is genuinely exceptional is tactical: the seizure of power. Whether it amounts to wisdom the record so far suggests not.
Legacy
At forty, Mohammed bin Salman has effectively governed Saudi Arabia for a decade and is likely to rule for several more. He inherited a gerontocracy and replaced it with a personal autocracy; he inherited a closed society, opened much of its cultural life and narrowed its political space to nothing. His kingdom will be measured against Vision 2030's own promises — a post-oil economy, the 2034 World Cup — and by whether the freedoms he granted survive a ruler less interested in granting them.
Achievements
- Notable work: Saudi Vision 2030
- Affiliated with Bureau of Experts at the Saudi Council of Ministers, Governor of Riyadh Region and Royal Court
- Educated at King Saud University
- Worked as politician
