Contraband Whiskey and a Secret Royal Dinner: Wall Street Goes to Riyadh

Are you an international business titan on the hunt for billions of dollars of Saudi oil cash? Prepare for “a mind game.”

At exactly 6:19 p.m. last Tuesday, in a gold-trimmed hallway snaking off the lobby of the Ritz-Carlton, Riyadh, a lesson emerged in money, power and what Arabs call wasta, or influence.

The scene was opened by Marc Rowan, the private equity billionaire, pacing the carpet leading up the unremarkably named Meeting Room B — where a few minutes earlier chairs had been arranged in a semicircle.

Mr. Rowan, clad in a neat suit rather than his usual sweaters, was 11 minutes early — he actually doubled back a few times, apparently unwilling to arrive first — but was soon followed by a dozen or so titans of technology and finance, including top executives of the Carlyle Group, BlackRock, Citi and Standard Chartered, and founders of the giant hedge funds Bridgewater Associates and Third Point.

Once amassed, they were whisked en masse by Saudi security to a dinner in Diriyah, the ancestral home of the al-Saud family, at the farm of the crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman — who was accused of organizing the murder of a dissident journalist six years earlier, and of the imprisonment, torture and shakedown of his own family members during what his government called an anticorruption operation in this very same Ritz.

If that had made him an international pariah, the promenade of some of the biggest names in international business to his dinner table was a reminder that he is back in favor.

If money talks on Wall Street, it’s shouting now in Saudi Arabia. Like China, Russia and Brazil a generation ago, the kingdom is the ultimate “emerging market” — a place that Western financiers and international sports leagues and star athletes are eager to genuflect to.

Nowhere was this more obvious than it was last week at the annual Future Investment Initiative, a sprawling confab at and around the Ritz sometimes called “Davos in the Desert.” Nobody at the event calls it that; there isn’t time, really, with so many local money trees to shake and only so many hours in a day.

The executives were queued up for a chance at trillions of dollars of oil money that might be invested in their companies and funds. An audience with the crown prince and the colossal state-owned investment funds he controls is one of the biggest prizes on the international financial circuit.

A representative of the Saudi government declined to comment. A conference spokesman confirmed that the invitation-only dinner had been held, but declined to provide specifics, citing privacy. The New York Times viewed an invitation to it, including the instruction to gather in Meeting Room B, in advance.

Many of the business leaders now enthusiastic about Saudi Arabia and its oil wealth were until recently wrapping themselves in the trends of the environmental, social and governance movement, or E.S.G. While Saudi Arabia is liberalizing by some metrics, such as women’s rights, under Prince Mohammed’s rule it has hardened its autocracy.

For the Western finance crowd, there’s plenty of reason to show up. Just inside the main ballroom — past the bomb-sniffing dogs casing a fleet of conference-branded Lucid luxury electric cars — attendees chatted excitedly about which of the coterie of Saudi investment affiliates or wealthy families they had landed a meeting with.

Even a small “check,” or investment from a Saudi company or family, might be $100 million, earmarked for artificial intelligence initiatives or energy infrastructure, attendees said. On the higher end, there were groups such as the government’s official sovereign wealth fund, called the Public Investment Fund and led by the magnate Yasir Al-Rumayyan, willing to write multibillion-dollar checks.

To this crowd, the worst fate would be to wind up wasting your time with the million-dollar group when much more was on offer. One attendee wound up at three dinners in one evening — he had been invited to all of them at the last minute on the same day, he said, and didn’t want to seem to be picking favorites.

“It’s a mind game,” he said.

Plenty of major names are willing to play it. Attendees at the investment conference could see the SoftBank founder, Masayoshi Son, being driven around in a golf cart; Wilbur L. Ross Jr., the former secretary of commerce, and Eric Cantor, the former House majority leader, at a buffet lunch; and the hedge-fund titan Daniel S. Loeb, sporting $975 Loro Piana suede loafers, fiddling with his phone a few feet from the television personality Dr. Mehmet Oz.

All seemed willing to help give the kingdom what it wants: a leg up against other Persian Gulf states in the race for global financial influence and a commitment to bring their businesses to the country. Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar are increasingly demanding that global firms commit to more on-the-ground arrangements — such as expansive local headquarters — with an eye to new jobs and opportunities for their burgeoning young populations. The annual gathering in Riyadh is key to that effort.

The conference spokesman pointed to tens of billions of dollars of deals struck at the gathering, including an agreement for a multibillion-dollar Google data center to build up Arabic capabilities for artificial intelligence.

“The Middle East isn’t, despite the reputation, dumb money,” said Saleha Osmani, a Dubai-based consultant to international investors at Falconbridge Advisors.

And in certain ways, the Saudis are willing to bend as much toward their visitors. Though consumption of alcohol is officially forbidden in the country, there were myriad workarounds for the visiting finance set.

Several attendees spoke of piling into four-wheelers for trips into the desert, where booze was readily available at the private compounds of prominent local families and government-connected investors. One venture capitalist boasted that he had stuck around a party drinking lukewarm camel-milk tea out of gold cups until the stroke of midnight — when a side door was dramatically opened to reveal a staffed bar with whiskey shots.

Those who weren’t invited there might have wound up, as did this reporter, at a hookah bar called Hooqah, an evening sponsored by Amazon. It served zero-alcohol wines with proportionate flavor, and attracted no small number of the slew of 20-something Saudi financial analysts now employed to help invest the kingdom’s cash.

Told that Prince Mohammed had held his private dinner the night before, one such young man let out the smallest of sighs, and said he would have liked to have been there.

What would he have told the group?

“I would have said nothing,” the young man answered, miming a hand over his mouth. “Who am I?”

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