How Saudi Arabia shaped Silicon Valley

Throughline

Elon Musk. Donald Trump. Bill Gates. Sam Altman. Larry Ellison. Alex Karp.  Jared Kushner. Mr. Beast. Jeffrey Epstein… Those are just a few of the people who have been friendly with, and often done business with, Saudi Arabia over the last decade. Today on the show: how one of the world’s most authoritarian regimes became one of Silicon Valley’s biggest investors – and what that’s meant for the rest of us.

To access bonus episodes and listen to Throughline sponsor-free, subscribe to Throughline+ via Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org/throughline.


See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.

NPR Privacy Policy
2026-03-26 49 min

Available Results

Generated results are saved to the knowledge database for reuse and search.

No generated results are available for this episode yet.

Extract Knowledge

Pick what you want extracted first. Model, scope, and chapter options appear after a template is selected.

Generated results for public episodes are saved to the knowledge database so they can be reused and searched later.

Transcript

No transcript is available for this episode yet.
Sign in to generate a transcript for review.
Sign in

Chapters

No chapters available.