Forbes removed the Kingdom’s billionaires from our ranking of the world’s wealthiest people in 2018, but they’re back now. Here’s what happened and why.
Seven years ago, Forbes made the decision not to include billionaires from Saudi Arabia on our annual World’s Billionaires list, primarily due to one big event in the country that led to a very high level of uncertainty: the house arrest and reported shakedown of hundreds of wealthy Saudi businessmen, including a prominent member of the royal family. This year, following a burst of new listings on the Saudi stock exchange, the Kingdom’s billionaires are back on the list, published Tuesday.
Fifteen Saudi Arabians made Forbes’ 2025 ranking, up from 10 in 2017. They range from the founder of a hospital group, to an operator of grocery stores and malls, to the scion of a prominent banking family. Altogether these billionaires–all men, aged 49 to 95–are worth an estimated $55.8 billion.
The richest (and only returnee to the list) is Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, with a fortune estimated at $16.5 billion. About 40% of that lies in his ownership stake in Saudi-listed Kingdom Holding, which has investments in the Four Seasons hotel chain, the George V hotel in Paris and had an estimated low-single-digit stake in X (formerly Twitter) alongside Elon Musk. Alwaleed bin Talal last appeared on Forbes’ billionaires list in 2017, worth an estimated $18.7 billion. (Two of the other 2017-era Saudi billionaires, Saleh Kamel and Abduallah Al Rajhi, have died, while the others from that period—including brothers Abdul Majeed, Salman and Fawaz Alhokair—failed to make the cut this year due to steep drops in their companies’ share prices.)
The 14 other Saudi billionaires on this year’s list are all newcomers. Six are founders or cofounders who listed their company’s shares on the Saudi stock exchange in recent years. That includes the second wealthiest Saudi, Sulaiman Al Habib, who is founder and chairman of Riyadh-based hospital group Dr. Sulaiman Al Habib Medical Services Group, known as HMG. Al Habib, a trained pediatrician, launched the group in 1995 and took it public on the Saudi stock exchange in 2020; he owns a 40% stake.
Others have inherited and built on their family fortunes. Brothers Emad, Essam and Sulaiman Al Muhaidib took over Dammam-based conglomerate Al Muhaidib Group, founded by their late father Abdulkadir, after his death in 1996 and expanded it into consumer products, infrastructure, construction, real estate and finance. The brothers each own 28% of the privately held firm—four other family members own smaller stakes—and together they own shares in at least sixteen publicly traded companies in Saudi Arabia and Egypt, with the largest part of their fortune coming from ACWA Power, a Saudi-listed power generation and desalinated water production company that went public in 2021.
Why did Forbes stop listing Saudi Arabia’s billionaires for seven years? Mainly due to concern about the reliability of available information. In November 2017, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman (known as MBS) orchestrated a roundup of the country’s richest people and put them under house arrest in Riyadh’s Ritz Carlton hotel for several months, under allegations of corruption. The Saudi government’s reported goal was to gather $100 billion to bolster its budget. At least four of the Saudi billionaires then on Forbes’ list were reportedly detained. None would comment on how much they’d handed over to the government. Thus we decided to take them off the list in 2018.
There is still some degree of uncertainty about who really owns what. Several Saudi experts Forbes spoke with pointed to the difficulty of getting reliable information on such matters and the general reluctance among Saudis to discuss the topic. “In the Kingdom, one cannot counter the views of the Crown Prince,” says one expert, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
In the years since 2018, the Saudi Public Investment Fund–a sovereign wealth fund known as PIF for short–has taken stakes in some of the country’s largest public companies, including those run by a couple of the country’s billionaires. In 2022, Alwaleed bin Talal’s Kingdom Holding announced that the PIF was spending $1.5 billion to acquire a 16.9% stake. That resulted in a drop in Alwaleed’s ownership to 78.1%, from a prior 95%.
In November last year, the PIF acquired 54% of broadcasting firm MBC, founded by billionaire Waleed bin Ibrahim al Ibrahim, for a reported $1.97 billion. The seller was reported to be Istedemah Holding Company, a government-owned entity that is part of the Saudi Ministry of Finance. Istedemah reportedly acquired the stake in MBC following the 2017 Ritz Carlton affair.
"MBS turned around and said, ‘It's time for you guys to start putting into the economy rather than taking out, you’ve been enjoying the high life and now that’s over,’” says Charles Robertson, the London-based head of macro strategy at asset manager FIM Partners. “A few lost everything, but most people just came to a deal. The government's role now is to incentivize the private sector, for the PIF to take stakes in companies that need that financial support for a while.”
Aside from the PIF, foreign investors have also been flooding into Saudi companies. Saudi Arabia first opened its stock market to foreigners in 2015, and foreign participation in the Saudi index has more than quadrupled since 2018, according to stock index provider MSCI. At the same time, more Saudi companies have been going public, with 15 companies launching IPOs on the main Tadawul stock exchange in 2024 alone—more than the total number of listings between 2015 and 2020. Over the past five years, Saudi companies have raised $24 billion selling shares to the public, more than any other country in the Middle East except the United Arab Emirates.
Locals have also been pouring into the stock market. “This is how Saudis gamble, effectively. Instead of Las Vegas, they go and play on the stock market," says Robertson, pointing to greater interest from Saudis and outside investors alike. "Foreigners have been coming in, there's been a lot of interest. The stock exchange's annual event is pretty well attended."