On November 14, Wall Street feted Yasir Al-Rumayyan, the head of Saudi Arabia’s nearly $1 trillion sovereign wealth fund and a close confidante of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud (MBS). At Cipriani—a private members’ club at 55 Wall Street—bright flowers at the center of the tables matched the ruby-red drapes. This gala, thrown by the Business Council for International Understanding, was a mark of the massive volume of Saudi investment capital percolating through the American economy. That itself isn’t new, but in recent years it’s become clear that the shame associated with Saudi funding in the wake of the grisly 2018 murder and dismemberment of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi has faded. Few seemed to even notice that the governor of the Saudi Public Investment Fund—which a Senate subcommittee is currently investigating for undue foreign influence in the fund’s seemingly hostile takeover of the PGA golf Tour—was receiving an award in Manhattan.

On stage in Cipriani’s Greek revival ballroom, the president of Google’s parent company, Alphabet, presented Al-Rumayyan with a large crystal paperweight. Sitting with them at the long head table was HuffPo founder Arianna Huffington, and among the hundreds of minglers making their way through the room were hedge-fund titan Ray Dalio, Hollywood superagent Ari Emanuel, former Trump adviser Dina Powell McCormick, and Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi.

The evening’s theme—“Champions of Change: Values in Practice”—couldn’t have been more incongruous for Al-Rumayyan, the billionaire lieutenant to one of the world’s most brutal rulers. (I had hoped to attend in person to investigate whether anyone there had qualms about honoring MBS’s money man. Sadly, I was told that the proceedings were closed to journalists.) But the whole event managed to avoid greater scrutiny because Saudi power in the United States, under successive presidents, has become so normalized.

In 2023 alone, the Public Investment Fund spent $31.6 billion worldwide, and it currently holds about $20 billion worth of US stocks. Beyond its vanity projects like the futuristic city of Neom or its gifting of $2 billion to Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner, PIF is planning a staggering $40 billion AI fund. Meanwhile, its venture capital arm has doled out about $3 billion a year to Wall Street stalwarts and the entire universe of private equity and venture capital firms powering Silicon Valley. “There’s no distinction between the [Saudi fund’s] money and the de facto ruler, who is Mohammed bin Salman,” Hala Aldosari, a Saudi activist living in exile in the US, told me.

This is not just a Trump phenomenon. President Joe Biden’s about-face—capped by fist-bumping MBS on a visit to the kingdom in 2022 that broke with his campaign pledge to make Saudi Arabia a “pariah”—explicitly gave American business permission to go all in. Since Israel launched its war on Gaza, the Biden administration has further revived MBS’s global stature and tamped down its already muted human rights rhetoric. As Aldosari put it, “It’s going to get worse with Trump now, but in terms of US foreign policy in the Middle East, it’s very much problematic regardless of the political party.”

In anticipation, many American and international companies are already expanding their dealings in Saudi Arabia. Even the consultancy founded by the late Madeleine Albright, which long held itself out as a values-driven firm, just opened a headquarters in Riyadh.

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In Saudi Arabia, basic freedoms have not improved since Khashoggi was lured inside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul and murdered. The regime’s crackdown on women’s rights activists has accelerated. “It’s the worst we’ve ever seen,” Aldosari says. Prison sentences are getting longer even for relatively low-profile cases, as part of what she calls the regime’s “systematic approach” to snuffing out dissent. She cited two women recently prosecuted for their tweets, notably Nourah al-Qahtani, who was jailed for 45 years and Salma al-Shehab, who received 34 years. Plus, earlier this year, a Saudi cartoonist named Al-Hazza was sentenced to 23 years.

In a new report, Human Rights Watch documents how the Public Investment Fund has enabled internal clampdowns in Saudi Arabia. Drawing upon newly released court documents, Human Rights Watch notes that Al-Rumayyan was a key figure in the 2017 Ritz roundup in which 200 wealthy Saudi royals and businesspeople were detained and blackmailed in the luxury hotel in Riyadh.

While it’s tough to get American business to care about issues of global human rights, the risks inherent in working in an autocracy might get their attention. Human Rights Watch details how the state has repeatedly expropriated the assets of people and companies, without due process.

One Saudi entrepreneur based in the US (who would speak to me only on the condition of anonymity) emphasized that Western corporations that engage with the Saudi sovereign wealth fund are exposed to financial as well as reputational risks. “By associating with a fund connected to human rights abuses, they face increasing backlash from investors, consumers, and global stakeholders demanding ethical accountability,” he told me. “The absence of reliable dispute resolution mechanisms in Saudi Arabia leaves companies vulnerable to arbitrary practices, such as unjust expropriations, without any credible options for redress.”

But investment capital apparently remains in short supply, and Al-Rummayan’s sovereign wealth purse holds $925 billion. (He also chairs the national oil company, Saudi Aramco.) In the months following Khashoggi’s assassination, business and finance leaders only quietly sealed deals with Saudi Arabia; now it’s out in the open.

The Ritz Carlton, the site of MBS’s five-star detention facility, is once again home to big business. In late October, a think tank connected to Al-Rumayyan’s sovereign wealth fund hosted its annual summit in Riyadh, known as Davos in the Desert. In the room were billionaires Dalio, Larry Fink, Ken Griffin, Marc Rowan, Eric Schmidt, and Steve Schwarzman. Elon Musk, who has also benefited from Saudi financial largesse, took the time to appear by video. The public panels focused on innovation and financial trends while studiously avoiding politics, yet there were, as ever, moments that revealed why they had really gathered in Saudi Arabia.

David Rubenstein, the Carlyle billionaire who as recently as last year played host to the Biden family for Thanksgiving at his Nantucket retreat, has become a regular of these Saudi events. Moderating a panel, Rubenstein began by flattering the host—or perhaps calling the event for what it is.

“Let me ask Yasir,” Rubenstein began, “is the biggest problem with being the governor of the PIF fund that you don’t have enough requests for money?”

Al-Rumayyan laughed, but the numbers are nothing to joke about. Attendees told The New York Times that just a small check from him could amount to $100 million. The Saudi fund’s venture arm notes on its website 143 startups, investment funds, and real estate companies that it’s currently backing. Among those listed: Rowan’s Apollo, Schmidt’s Innovation Endeavors, and Schwarzman’s Blackstone. Fink’s BlackRock received $5 billion from the PIF for a new investment platform.

PIF says that $70 billion of agreements were inked at the October confab, including a partnership between the Saudi fund and Google Cloud to “advance AI research in Arabic-language models,” according to the company. Its president and chief investment officer, Ruth Porat, sat on the panel with Al-Rumayyan in Riyadh. A few weeks later, the Google executive presented him with the Eisenhower Award for Global Transformation in New York, for “values in practice.” But what values does Saudi investment represent beyond the value of money?

Expect to see more of the Saudi sovereign-wealth kingmaker. Days later at Madison Square Garden, Al-Rumayyan chatted with President-elect Trump at an Ultimate Fighting Championship match, with Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy nearby. It’s likely that in Trump’s second term there will be many more galas for Al-Rumayyan, with a full state visit for MBS on the horizon.