How Mohammed bin Salman Has Wielded Saudi Arabia’s Wealth

In 2021, soon after President Donald Trump’s first term ended, his son-in-law Jared Kushner entered the private equity industry.

Kushner, a former real estate developer, had served as a top advisor to Trump on Middle East issues, with special focus on the relationship with Saudi Arabia.

Now, as Kushner was working to get his new company off the ground, that experience would prove useful.

“His first step was reaching out to Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman to help fund his new private equity business,” David Kirkpatrick of The New Yorker tells FRONTLINE.

The story of why, and what happened next, unfolds in the above video. It’s drawn from The Crown Prince & the President, a new, 90-minute documentary examining the political alliance between the de facto leader of Saudi Arabia and the Trump administration. In the documentary, correspondent Martin Smith traces how this consequential relationship has grown despite concerns over Saudi Arabia’s human rights record — and probes who has benefited.

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Since coming to power, MBS has grown his oil-rich Kingdom’s public investment fund and used it as a potent tool, Smith finds.

“In the modern times, you don’t need an army, you need a sovereign wealth fund,” Bradley Hope, author of a book on MBS called Blood and Oil, tells Smith. “That really is quite true, I think, if you’re a small country, especially. They have these big funds, and it’s kind of how they wield influence and power in the world.”

As the above video explains, when Kushner reached out to ask for funding after Trump’s first term ended, the board overseeing Saudi Arabia’s public investment fund was initially reluctant. Kushner had limited private equity experience, they wrote in documents obtained by The New York Times, and his company, Affinity Partners, lacked “any quantifiable investment track-record.”

But the crown prince himself ultimately gave a thumbs up to Kushner’s request. And he dismissed suggestions it was a “tit for tat,” saying on Fox News that it was one of “a lot of investments around the globe with a lot of peoples.”

The $2 billion investment with Affinity Partners came several years after MBS, who had portrayed himself as a reformer, cracked down on dissent and was linked by U.S. intelligence agencies to a Saudi hit squad’s high-profile 2018 murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

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“We can only guess as to the motivation, but it kind of speaks for itself, right?” Peter Baker of The New York Times tells Smith of the investment in the video. “Jared had been instrumental in protecting them from consequences from the Jamal Khashoggi murder, and perhaps they saw a future Trump administration coming back.”

MBS has denied involvement in Khashoggi’s murder and defended the propriety of his investment in Kushner’s company. Kushner also pushed back against criticism, describing MBS as “a visionary leader” and saying, “I think what he’s done in that region is transformational.”

The investment with Kushner’s firm was one of many MBS was making through the Kingdom’s sovereign wealth fund — including $1 billion for the business venture of another former Trump administration insider, Steven Mnuchin, who served as Treasury secretary in the first term.

“Mohammed bin Salman, particularly in the wake of the ostracism that he faced after the murder of Khashoggi, massively expanded investments in U.S. businesses,” human rights lawyer Sarah Leah Whitson tells Smith.

Mnuchin and Kushner have both brushed off concerns about conflicts of interest, and at the time of those investments, they were private citizens. But as The Crown Prince & the President explores, when Trump was re-elected in 2024, Kushner once again became a senior advisor to the president focused on Middle East diplomacy. At the time, Affinity Partners was reportedly taking in tens of millions of dollars a year in fees from the Saudis.

In the video, Smith asks Victoria Coates, Trump’s former deputy national security advisor for Middle Eastern affairs, about the resulting criticism.

“There may well be an appearance problem, but I mean, then it’s been a problem for, I guess, 10 years now, and that didn’t prevent the American people from resoundingly re-electing President Trump in 2024,” Coates says.

Kushner says he did not take any salary from the U.S. government for his work — a fact that White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt has highlighted, calling reporters’ conflict-of-interest questions “frankly despicable.”

“Jared is donating his energy and his time to our government, to the president of the United States, to secure world peace,” Leavitt says in a press conference that’s excerpted in the documentary. “And that is a very noble thing.”

Drawing on more than 100 interviews, The Crown Prince & the President is a powerful examination of the relationship between MBS and the Trump administration, and the ramifications for the U.S., Saudi Arabia and the Middle East as a whole.

“President Trump saw Saudi Arabia as really the linchpin to the modern Middle East,” Coates says in the documentary.