One of Saudi Arabia’s richest men, Prince Alwaleed bin Talal saw his fortune surge after SpaceX began trading on June 12. The Saudi billionaire’s investment firm Kingdom Holding Co. saw its holding rise to almost $7 billion, or roughly half its market capitalization.
Kingdom Holding said it holds 42.4 million shares in SpaceX, valued at $6.8 billion based on the company’s closing price. Kingdom shares rose as much as 5%, valuing the company at 56 billion riyals ($14.9 billion).
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SpaceX began trading last week after raising $75 billion in the largest listing of all time, which valued the company at $1.77 trillion, and made its founder and CEO Elon Musk a trillionaire.
Earlier this month, Kingdom Holding said its holding represents 0.34% of SpaceX, while Prince Alwaleed’s personal exposure amounts to about 0.29% of Elon Musk’s rocket and satellite company. With the holdings, Alwaleed bin Talal’s net worth reached over 27 billion, a decade-high, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
According to Fortune, other investors in Saudi Arabia also benefited from SpaceX’s listing. This includes the $1 trillion Public Investment Fund, which owns a stake in Alwaleed’s firm, as well as the country as a whole, which has made artificial intelligence a chief focus in order to diversify away from oil.
PIF-backed Humain invested $3 billion into Musk’s xAI this year as part of a $20 billion funding round. That deal gave Humain a significant minority stake in xAI, with holdings that it said at the time would convert into SpaceX shares.
Notably SpaceX had in its IPO broken a record set by Saudi Arabian company Aramco, which raised $25.6 billion on Riyadh’s exchange in December 2019, valuing it at $1.71 trillion. In inflation-adjusted terms, Aramco raised $33.2 billion for a $2.21 trillion value.
READ: SpaceX IPO hype meets investor caution (June 8, 2026)
Meanwhile other regional players are also investing in AI. Abu Dhabi’s MGX holds stakes in Anthropic, OpenAI and xAI — three of the most prominent AI firms. Qatar has pursued a similar strategy, investing in both Anthropic and xAI.
According to Fortune, while the AI push has been seen as a recent trend, some Gulf investors have been focusing on transformative technologies for a while. Abu Dhabi’s IHC invested in SpaceX in 2020, while Aabar took a stake in Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic in 2009, years before AI and space got market prominence.