Respond to prefers-color-scheme dark in app web views

Follow section front redirects in Spectrum

Enable NLP source in PCS for load testing

Switch off the News Alerts Survey Widget when we have enough responses

Poll to determine if new LUF updates are available

Allows the winning A/B test variant to be turned on without Spectrum deployment

Show infinite scrolling sections in Assembler MultiView

Show option for NLP article summaries in Action Bar

Show NLP summaries collection recirc on article pages

A general feature flag for Recipe Features that aren't yet released

Feature flag for media team features that aren't yet released

Use new Orca video player for preroll plugin in Spectrum

Show the snow tracker (instead of the heat tracker) on Spectrum

Tens of thousands in Georgia protest Russian-style ‘foreign agents’ law

Israeli operations in north and south Gaza force displaced to flee again

‘Nothing left’: At least 300 dead as flash floods devastate Afghanistan

Eighth-inning decision burns the Nats in a 4-2 loss to the Red Sox

Nats win opener at Fenway behind Patrick Corbin and a lockdown bullpen

Commanders rookie DT Johnny Newton needs a second foot surgery

‘Bunker mentality’ at Columbia lit protest spark that spread nationwide

A mystery illness stole their kids’ personalities. These moms fought for answers.

The greatness — yes, greatness — of the Planet of the Apes

I used to dismiss my mom’s advice. Then I found a note she wrote before she died.  

Photos of his mom at lunch are a balm people didn’t know they needed

Dog hit by car loses leg, is adopted by firefighter who helped her

Courtroom photo ban adds to hurdles for Trump trial journalists

Israel’s shameful ban on Al Jazeera

Checks, not sex, and other takeaways from Trump’s New York hush money trial

An unexpected sight to behold: Ted Cruz working bipartisan deals

Narrative of Trump snoozing in court takes hold — much to his annoyance

Manafort will no longer take on Republican convention role

5 big travel lessons from an accomplished conservationist

Cruise ship drags dead whale into New York, prompting investigation

The case for eating at Italian gas stations

Bishop vanished. His species can still be saved.

VCU grads walk out during Gov. Youngkin’s speech

Northern lights glow worldwide

Fooled by AI? These firms sell deepfake detection that’s ‘REAL 100%.’ 

Apple apologizes for iPad ad after blowback 

Google’s new ‘Find My’ device network is useful but a stalking risk

Carolyn Hax: Keep scrolling seven hours per day, or give therapy a try?

Ask Amy: Mother isn’t accepting of her gay son

Ask Amy: What do I say about my former walking buddy who yelled at me?

The urgent air defense lessons of April 16 

Are smartphones destroying childhood? It’s complicated.

In the campaign against Donald Trump, do the ends justify the means?

Kristi Noem’s dog killing is pure Southern gothic

Claire Messud turns her family’s history into a masterpiece

Joseph Epstein, conservative provocateur, tells his life story in full

Trump hush money trial live updates: Michael Cohen testifies

Last November, the young Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/saudi-arabia-detains-princes-ministers-and-billionaire-investor-in-extraordinary-purge/2017/11/05/ea0aa25c-c1fc-11e7-af84-d3e2ee4b2af1_story.html?utm_term=.224ebd5554a4">ordered the arrest of hundreds of Saudi Arabia's elite</a>, including cabinet ministers and nearly a dozen blood relatives — princes like himself.

Among the most prominent of those arrested was the crown prince’s cousin, Prince Alwaleed bin Talal — a globe-trotting billionaire once rumored to have designs on the throne.

While Saudi officials said the arrests were from an “anti-corruption” probe, Alwaleed’s imprisonment fueled suspicion that the crown prince was really trying to eliminate rivals as he prepares to inherit the throne from his father.

Alwaleed was suddenly <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/prince-alwaleed-bin-talal-billionaire-investor-is-released-from-custody-in-saudi-arabia-relative-says/2018/01/27/8083a212-035a-11e8-93f5-53a3a47824e8_story.html?utm_term=.e91c4ddb310d">set free</a> Saturday. The precise reasons for his months-long incarceration in a Ritz-Carlton hotel remain unknown to the public. So do the implications for his massive portfolio of investments, many in the United States, and his rumored lifestyle of occasionally bizarre opulence.

The biography on Alwaleed’s personal website consists of a <a href="http://www.alwaleed.com.sa/about/">single sentence</a> about his lineage (born 1955; grandson of the first king of Saudi Arabia), followed by a dense page crammed with details of his wealth and power: his companies’ holdings in Twitter, Lyft, Euro Disney and Twentieth Century Fox; luxury hotels around the world; a tower under construction in Saudi Arabia that will soon be the <a href="http://www.arabnews.com/node/1098066/saudi-arabia">world’s tallest building</a>.

Business Insider once reported the prince kept “a group of dancing, laughing, joking dwarfs” in his entourage, occasionally tossing them around as sport <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/prince-alwaleed-2012-1?page=1">like human shot puts.</a> That isn’t in the official biography. And it would be a shame if all you knew about Alwaleed was his wealth, because the personality behind those billions of dollars sounds no less extraordinary.

It’s true that Alwaleed descends from King Abdul Aziz ibn Saud, the founder of Saudi Arabia, which the Saud family has controlled ever since. But the website biography doesn’t mention what <a href="https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2013/03/myth-prince-alwaleed-bin-talal-saudi">Vanity Fair will tell you</a>: that Alwaleed’s father rebelled against the repressive monarchy in the 1960s, forever damaging his line’s chances of inheriting the throne. Though that hasn’t stopped Alwaleed from <a href="https://www.forbes.com/forbes/2009/0330/092-cannot-wait-to-be-king.html">hinting</a> that he might one day sit on it.

Vanity Fair’s profile also retells — with some skepticism — the official story of how Alwaleed amassed his immense fortune. It reads like a fairy tale.

The prince was about 30, having returned from Menlo College in California with a business degree in 1985.

“Alwaleed claims his father gave him $30,000. Within a year, he had lost the money,” the Vanity Fair profile says. “He went back to his father, who gave him $300,000. This time, it took him three years to lose it.”

The third time was the charm: Alwaleed’s father gave him the deed to a house instead of cash and told him, “Work for yourself.” So he took a loan out on the deed, and with some shrewd investments (and his royal stipend, and the proceeds from hawking a $200,000 heirloom), the prince learned to become a self-made man.

Others have speculated that his fortune owes more to the royal family’s control of Saudi Arabia’s oil, <a href="https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2013/03/myth-prince-alwaleed-bin-talal-saudi">Vanity Fair wrote</a> — or even that Alwaleed is “a front man for the vast wealth of the Saudi royal family.”

In any event, the prince surged to the top of the billionaires list in the early 1990s, not through any enterprise inside his family’s kingdom but by investing in a then-struggling U.S. bank, now known as Citicorp.

From that point on, Alwaleed was a prince without borders. He <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/stephen-k-bannon-architect-of-antiglobalist-policies-got-rich-as-a-global-capitalist/2017/03/31/47382082-0a8b-11e7-a15f-a58d4a988474_story.html?utm_term=.750308eee455">worked with</a> Stephen K. Bannon in the late 1990s. Donald Trump <a href="http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/sns-bc-ml--saudi-arabia-business-20171105-story.html">sold him a yacht</a>. At 62, the Associated Press reported, he’s one of the major shareholders in Apple and Twitter.

But we’re getting sidetracked by dollar signs again. In our defense, they suffuse almost every anecdote about the prince’s personality, and his hard-to-pin-down politics.


<i>
    [Billionaire Saudi prince tweeted that he would reward bombers with Bentleys. Then he deleted the tweet]
  </i>


Alwaleed donated $10 million to help New York after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, Business Insider reported, for example. But Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani (R) turned the money down after the prince <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/prince-alwaleed-2012-1?page=1">issued a news release</a> criticizing the U.S. position on the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians.

He has always been a press-happy prince. (Or occasionally press-cranky, as when Alwaleed <a href="http://www.reuters.com/article/us-saudi-alwaleed-forbes/saudi-prince-alwaleed-says-settles-forbes-libel-suit-over-fortune-idUSKBN0OW10S20150616">sued Forbes for defamation</a>, claiming the magazine had underestimated his wealth at a mere $20 billion.)

Seated in a recliner in shaded glasses at night, Business Insider <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/prince-alwaleed-2012-1?page=1">reported</a>, Alwaleed held forth to CNBC on the banking crisis in 2008. The same year, according to Forbes, he put on a ceremonial Saudi robe and took his personal Boeing 747 to the city of Jiddah. There he pitched his uncle, King Abdullah, on his plan to build a skyscraper more than a kilometer tall.

“It will be the epicenter of Jiddah,” the prince <a href="https://www.forbes.com/forbes/2009/0330/092-cannot-wait-to-be-king.html">told Forbes</a>. “It will be a magnet.”

The mile-high tower is slated to open in 2019.

About midway through the tower's construction, Business Insider ran an exposé on Alwaleed’s lifestyle at his headquarters in the Saudi capital, Riyadh. That’s where the dwarfs come in.

“Almost every source we spoke to, including Alwaleed’s official spokesperson, confirmed that, like a medieval monarch, Alwaleed keeps in his entourage a group of dancing, laughing, joking dwarfs,” <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/prince-alwaleed-2012-1?page=1">the outlet reported</a> in 2012. “One source called them ‘jesters.’ ”

Not only did the prince hold occasional “midget-tossing” contests with these people, Business Insider wrote, but once invited his “jesters” to a business meeting, where he taught them the words “Boeing” and “Airbus” and had them decide which type of plane he should add to his personal fleet.

In the face of such bizarre accusations, Alwaleed has made great demonstrations of his concern for human rights — especially among the poor and women.


<i>
    [Saudi prince pledges to give away his fortune — all $32 billion of it]
  </i>


“Can you believe this? It’s horrible,” <a href="https://www.forbes.com/forbes/2009/0330/092-cannot-wait-to-be-king.html">he told Forbes</a> while handing out cash-stuffed envelopes in a Riyadh slum. The same article noted that women who work for Alwaleed’s offices are discouraged from wearing the veils they’re forced to wear in public.

The prince wrote <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/25/opinion/25alsaud.html">an op-ed</a> for the New York Times during the “Arab Spring” revolutions, condemning autocratic Arab nations led by those who “serve special and self-serving interests” and embracing his father’s criticism of Saudi Arabia’s autocracy.

And two years ago, following in the footsteps of Western billionaires such as Bill Gates, Alwaleed promised to give away <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2015/07/01/saudi-prince-pledges-to-give-away-his-fortune-all-32-billion-of-it/?utm_term=.f2d286e705ee">his entire fortune, estimated in excess of $30 billion,</a> in the indefinite future — “to build a more peaceful, equitable and sustainable world,” he told reporters.

The prince was among many global leaders to <a href="https://twitter.com/alwaleed_talal/status/675390247165915137?lang=en">condemn</a> Trump early in his run for president, but then <a href="https://twitter.com/alwaleed_talal/status/796341367106637828?lang=en">attempt reconciliation</a> after the election.

As The Washington Post previously wrote, some have <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2015/07/01/saudi-prince-pledges-to-give-away-his-fortune-all-32-billion-of-it/?utm_term=.f2d286e705ee">suggested</a> that Alwaleed is essentially running a PR campaign for his Western business holdings. Others wonder whether he has designs on the Saudi throne. That’s one theory for why Saudi Arabia’s crown prince — Alwaleed’s cousin — had him and 10 other princes arrested in November to face a“royal anti-corruption” committee, amid <a href="https://www.brookings.edu/blog/markaz/2017/06/23/will-saudi-arabias-king-salman-abdicate/">rumors</a> that the king is preparing to step down.

Power in Saudi Arabia has long passed between the sons of the founding king, <a href="https://www.forbes.com/forbes/2009/0330/092-cannot-wait-to-be-king.html">Forbes wrote in 2009</a>. But the line of succession has become complicated as that generation nears the end of its life span.

Could the globe-trotting, billionaire son of a dissident one day take the throne?

“Sure,” Alwaleed told Forbes. “The chain of command of people who could become king in this country is between the sons and the grandsons of King Abdulaziz. I am among them.”

“Alwaleed is the Donald Trump of Saudi Arabia,” an expert on the Saudi royal house told Forbes that year. “He may be a symbol of success for some Saudis, but many others view him as being way too gaudy.”

But that was many years ago. Trump is president of the United States now, and who knows what’s in store for Alwaleed?

<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/saudi-arabia-detains-princes-ministers-and-billionaire-investor-in-extraordinary-purge/2017/11/05/ea0aa25c-c1fc-11e7-af84-d3e2ee4b2af1_story.html" target="_blank">Saudi Arabia detains princes, ministers and billionaire investor in extraordinary purge</a>

Avi Selk is an assistant breaking news editor in the Features department. He previously worked as a reporter for more than a decade, at The Post and the Dallas Morning News, and still sometimes writes a thing or two.

Avi Selk

The Washington Post

War In Ukraine

Africa

Americas

Asia

Europe

Middle East

World

prism://prism.query/site-articles-only,/world/&limit=20

The Washington Post World section provides information and analysis of breaking world news stories. In addition to our world news and video, Post World News offers discussions and blogs on major international news and economic issues.