On a panel of billionaires and high-powered CEOs in Riyadh, the competition was not about who has the most assets under management, the best returns, or the swankiest private jet.
Instead, the friendly back-and-forth was focused on who had visited Saudi Arabia the most and the date of their first visit to the Middle East country.
BlackRock’s Larry Fink boasted of coming more than 65 times over several decades. Blackstone’s Steve Schwarzman said he first came to the country in 1991 when most of the roads were unpaved. Franklin Templeton CEO Jenny Johnson admitted she was late to the party — her first visit was in 2020 — but said she has made up time by coming on 15 different occasions since.
“It’s always a wonderful time to be back in the Kingdom,” fellow panelist Jane Fraser, the CEO of Citi, said.
The event was one of many at the Saudi-US Investment Forum in Riyadh on Tuesday; the forum is being held in conjuction with President Donald Trump’s state visit to the Kingdom, which said at the start of the president’s second stint in the White House that it would invest hundreds of billions in the US.
American investors, meanwhile, are looking to put capital to work in the Middle East.
Fink, who runs the world’s largest asset manager and is increasingly focused on private market investments in areas like infrastructure, said Saudi Arabia has become a capital “destination” instead of just a capital provider for foreign investors.
“The emphasis on 2030 was really a statement to the world that we’re going to do it ourselves,” Fink said about the country’s sovereign wealth fund’s plan to diversify and grow different parts of the economy.
Fraser said the next step for the country’s capital markets would be to build a treasury function. Johnson boasted about her firm’s new local private credit offering.
“We could see the Kingdom being a top 10 economy in the world,” Fink said of a country that produced $1.1 trillion in GDP last year — less than half of what Canada, the world’s tenth-largest economy, generated in 2024.
The optimism for the country’s future did not take away from the general uncertainty many finance leaders have expressed about the immediate future, thanks to the Trump administration’s tariff policies, though the recent agreement with China has provided hope that the new global trade landscape will be clearer soon.
The bigger fear expressed by Fink is not short-term volatility — “I don’t really care about the next 90 days,” he said — but instead a continued reliance on public funding for long-term projects.
The “vitality” of any economy, he said, is measured by the amount of private capital flowing to investments that will take years to complete.
So far, those who have invested in public-private partnerships in Saudi Arabia are pleased. Schwarzman said his firm’s $20 billion in 2018 from the Kingdom’s Public Investment Fund has generated annual returns of 17.5%.
“We have a lot of happy friends,” the billionaire said with a wry smile.
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