US-Saudi Business Forum: Big Discussions (Week 16/17 News Review)

President Trump embarked on a Middle East tour last week (May 13-16) that focused on three nations: Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and United Arab Emirates. He delivered key note speeches in Saudi Arabia and before the Gulf Cooperation Council (Saudi Arabia, Oman, UAE, Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain), and visited historic towns, palaces, and mosques. He did not forget to visit at least one airbase, Al Udeid Air Base, in Doha, Qatar. His entourage included cabinet level figures such as Secretary of State, Secretary of Commerce, Secretary of the Treasury, White House AI and Crypto Czar, Secretary of Defense, and other luminaries.

At the Saudi-U.S. Investment Forum on May 13, 2025, the Guest Speakers at the “Landmark Forum” included Scott Bessent (Treasury), Howard Lutnick (Commerce), Cristiano Amon (Qualcomm), Larry Fink (BlackRock), Gianni Infantino (FIFA), Andy Jassy (Amazon), Elon Musk (xAI, SpaceX), David Sacks (AI and Crypto Czar), Stephen Schwarzman (Blackstone), Ken West (Honeywell), and their ministerial counterparts, such as H.E. Khalid Bin Abdulaziz Al-Falih, Minister of Investment and H.E. Eng. Abdullah Alswaha, Minister of Communications and IT. President Donald J. Trump delivered a keynote address, and was appointed the co-chair of the GCC-USA Summit hosted by King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al-Saud, and co-chaired by H.R.H. Prince Mohammed bin Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud (known as MBS).

In Saudi Arabia, the tour was live-streamed at various point, including State Presidents meeting and greeting a huge number of Fortune 500 CEOs, entrepreneurs, global investors, high government officials, and other luminaries. People watched as Trump greeted and introduced, for instance, various “Tech Bro’s” to Prince MBS, including also investors. In fact, this Forum was notable in the openness for public viewing shared livestream throughout the world, with press releases and news also shared widely.

The event included a number of agreements or MOU (memorandums of understanding) being signed by Trump and MBS that total in the hundreds of billions worth of strategic partnerships designed to “strengthen our energy security, defense industry, technology leadership, and access to global infrastructure and critical minerals.” According to the White House, this will establish a “golden age of partnership” between the United States and Saudi Arabia that will help MAGA and the Gulf States.

Since Saudi Arabia is already aiming for a 2030 vision with grand futuristic projects such as Diriyah 2030 and Neom, also known as “The Line,” it is poised to become a major AI hub, so long as the money doesn’t run dry. The Tech Bro’s vision is based on a new boom in AI-investment, data service centers, and energy investment infused with today’s capitalistic buzz such as “robotics” “quantum” “AI” “augmented” “clean” and coupled with jingoisms like “transformative” “energy futures” “new energy security” and “future-proofed supply chain.”

They envision transforming the Gulf into a gleaming “Beacon on the Hill” for “new funding models” that will support new global investment flows which will in turn support “ambitious development projects.” AI & Technology can profit from a powerful new digital alliance with new cities housing hundreds of acres of data service centers so that most of human kind can conduct all of its personal and professional business instantaneously using cloud infrastructure operating on quantum computers and generating answers from genius-IQ ChatBots. Banking and finance will also be done via Cryptocurrency with real-time trading and manufacturing and purchasing substituting for laborious human interactions.

Amazon, OpenAI, BlackRock, Palantir, PayPal, Uber, Oracle, DataVolt, Nvidia, Meta, aerospace and defense industry giants are eager to hawk their capabilities to create safe virtual markets where people will no longer even have to travel to receive healthcare, education, or advance global competitiveness. Space X’s Elon Musk took center stage in a showcasing of Tesla-Optimus Robots doing the “Trump Dance.” His conversation with H.E. Eng. Abdullah Alswaha, Minister of Communications and IT onstage, is being widely shared about how we move forward from an oil-based to innovation-based economy.

“We’re headed to a radically different world. My prediction actually for humanoid robots is that ultimately there will be tens of billions [of them]. Everyone will want to have their personal robot. You can think of it like as though you had your own personal C-3PO or R2-D2. Who wouldn’t want to have their own C-3PO or R2-D2? I also think it unlocks an immense amount of economic potential. What is the output of an economy? The output of an economy is productivity per capita times population or capita. Once you have humanoid robots the actual economic output potential is unlimited. Potentially, we could have an economy ten times the size of the current global economy where no one wants for anything.” —Elon Musk, Tesla Founder, Space X, at Saudi-U.S. Investment Forum 2025

Musk is speaking of a designer society where “anyone can have any goods or services they want” and “everyone will live on universal high income.” Picture the trillions of dollars invested in sustainable-futuristic Neom, an oasis in the desert. What better way to complete the vision than with wiring and devices furnished by Microsoft, Qualcomm, Alphabet, Amazon, and all the rest of the great American IT companies. It will be better than “The Jetsons” cartoon, provided the women remember that they must wear their veils and be chaperoned by a suitable robot before going out in pubic alone.

Big Decision-Making, No Public Consent

The advantage of living under an authoritarian government, which the USA is heading towards with the ever-increasing levels of legitimized comprehensive surveillance and recording systems, is that anyone can be detained and arrested based on pre-crime suspicion, indefinitely. This is happening in Germany and the U.K. today, and forms of it are legitimate all-around the world. In the USA, hardly anyone knows that the Executive Office of the President of the United States now comprise a staff of at least 1800 employees, headed by Susie Wiles, the White House Chief of Staff. She is nominally the most powerful person behind the Trump presidency, at a time when the Congress appears to have ceded so much daily decision-making to the President himself. It is this team that is charged with influencing decision-making, coordinating the narratives, managing all the outgoing orders.

We have to thank President Trump for his tireless efforts at taking care of the nation’s affairs, and then conducting trade, and peace-making with so many global reachouts. Apparently, he does not worry about conducting trade agreements in person with each nation head of state, though of course, the Gulf States are omitted from any trade tariffs. Trump, even though he repeats himself in speech and seems to have no problem discussing national affairs on the world stage, merits an “A” for his efforts. The public and his fans were never better informed in what appears to be daily Presidential reality-show. Today we can view the latest Oval Office action meeting, press conference with foreign head of state seated, and surrounded by his cabinet and credentialed journalists, just because digital media access has never been better.

If without the help of Grok or Chatbot, US citizens are coping with a sense of hyper-reality, the near-instantaneous Trumpian response for the sake of managing image-perception and public relations, and the daily surprises, such as MOUs probably prepared months ago, suddenly being signed among transnational corporations and Kingdom, and receiving the Trump stamp of approval, it is humanly comprehensible. While we use our smartphones often, we hardly deal with the people on the other side: those developing the legal fine print, digital tech software, hardware, and complex interfaces. What is missed by the EOP is now assiduously tracked at the White House official website as if Trump is broadcasting a dossier complete with data tables.

Just with Saudi Arabia alone, the USA has signed MOUs totaling an estimated $600 billion dollars, anything from technology, to rare minerals development, to defensive weapons systems, to war-fighting equipment, to clean energy investment. But the Saudis have not approved the Abraham Accords, an agreement to try to normalize relations with Israel. Only Bahrain and the UAE have, while the rest at least verbally reprove Israel’s ongoing starvicide on Gaza. Since March 2nd, virtually no food aid has gone into Gaza, even though hundreds of thousands of pounds worth of food and food aid are parked outside of Rafah, according to Philippe Lazzarini, UN Palestinian refugee agency chief.

“And yet, less than a mile away [outside Rafah], hundreds of trucks sit full of life-saving food and aid blocked from entry by Israel…When you have been undernourished or malnourished consistently for now close to two years, the impact of it on your body is permanent. The impact never leaves you, especially for children.”

The food that does arrive risks being tainted by mold or otherwise spoiled. Doctors traveling to Gaza are having to wait outside Israel in Jordan for weeks, because in the interim, those hospitals are continuously shelled to the brink of collapse, as Dr. Adam Hamawy, a US Army veteran and plastic surgeon, recently shared in an interview at TRT World. Even British-Israeli preeminent historian Avi Schlaim, interviewed at Makdisi Street, asserts that as an Arab-Jew, he is horrified by what the Ashkenazi-Jews have done to Palestine, and that the only solution moving forward is the formation of a non-secular reconstituted Palestine, meaning today’s government, constitution, and Knesset should be dissolved.

Gazans are starving and no one cares. Commentator Phil Giraldi expresses that there has never been more anti-Semitic regulation and enforcement as inside of America today. And while alternative state-media, such as Democracy Now, is lately doing more reporting on the starvicide and final “Push to the South” by the IDF death squads, it may be to offer liability protection for American politicians. Using the cover of plausible deniability, the West can declare that “they knew, they tried, but nevertheless Gazans died.” In actuality, lethal arms supplier USA is the number one accomplice, the number one partner-in-crime in the ongoing genocide since the Nakba, but so far, the ICC and ICJ are sparing USA from the impending charges.

“Israeli soldier: ‘We used to bait the Palestinians with partially open food cans, to bait them, and then as they approached, we would empty our machine guns into them…'”

President Trump is distancing himself from P.M. Netanyahu because it makes good business sense, especially as CNN has documented the number of properties he holds in the Gulf States. For Trump Inc, selling memberships is big business for Trump hotels, golf courses, skyscrapers, and the variety of spinoffs including Trump’s new “meme coin” (cryptocurrency). The optics of being a co-belligerent don’t look too good inside the Gulf States, whether or not Abraham Accords, even for the most reactionary hive-mind of Trump-fandogs.

“At hospitals, they are prioritizing childen and women wounded by Israeli airstrikes. Other surgeries are postponed for many months due to shortages. Friends are living inside of ruined buildings which can collapse at any time of day. It is this endless situation of starvation, terrorization, persistent trauma that is being cropped every day and cut anew with no end in sight. It is the use of food to cause permanent health complications and damage particularly with children to destroy a group in whole or in part.”

According to independent journalists interviewed by Palestine Deep Dive or FPTV, the plan is to continue the Greater Israel Project. Countries that go along with the plan, whether it is Qatar or the UAE, will be rewarded with lucrative rebuilding contracts. Trump himself has stated several times that America should liberate and take-over Gaza, but he has not followed through with any serious punitive action to stop the Israeli food blockade and to force in the necessary immediate entry of food and water. It could stop tomorrow with just a phone call to Netanyahu, such as the US halting all aid to Israel permanently, and calling for the world to sanction Israel permanently, unless the Israelis stop their killing.

“Israel will continue the starvation, the famine, because one of its core goals is to empty out the Gaza Strip, to finish off the Gaza question. To tell people that if you want to survive, then leave Gaza.”

Trend Towards Autocracy, Zero Accountability

That is the problem with the trend towards autocracy. Whether it is Trump, Netanyahu, MBS, Putin (post 2012), Xi, and Modi, the trend supports those in society who gravitate towards a fascistical cult-of-personhood tendency. From the perspective of the Deep State, this makes it easier for them to control the narrative. All they have to do is replace the head with a look-alike, create a coup sending the head of state to jail, conduct mind-control/extortion operations on the head of state or immediate family, incapacitate the head of state, etc, and they can take the state in the desired direction.

Personhood makes the head of state also vulnerable to his/her own “reality distortion field” according to TheWire.in, because of the lack of “oxygen” at the top. The lack of genuine counsel and feedback, checks and balances, and the wish of the leader to confer divine status unto him/herself, for instance, seems to have transformed Narendra Modi’s self-perception into “one who has been sent to earth directly by God.” The danger is that when the leader changes his mind, his stance, everyone must reposition themselves behind the leader lest they suffer the hand of the sword or imprisonment or societal condemnation. This is, critics assert, how MBS rapidly climbed to the top, even though he was a son of the King’s third wife, not of the first issue.

MBS has conducting various purges in order to consolidate power behind him. Each time, the Prince purple-washed the purges claiming victimhood, fighting corruption, or controlling dissidents. Those purges known to the West involved high profile well-connected figures. For instance, there is the bizarre 2017-2019 Saudi Arabian purge in which thousands of people were confined to the Ritz-Carlton hotel in Riyadh beginning in November 2017. The pretext was a purge due to corruption connected with the planned city of Neom, and suspects, even foreigners, were prevented from leaving the hotel, while their bank accounts were frozen. At least 500 people were eventually rounded up, after which the Saudi government seized targeted cash and assets worth up to $800 billion dollars. The assets were claimed to be linked to corruption, money-laundering, bribery, extortion by officials, and abuse of power.

Critics of the monarchy were taken down in a related purge by the “Tiger Squad” whose work involves assassination of dissidents using covert methods to make it appear as an accident. They were also involved in the assassination of dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi, for instance. The Tiger Squad may have been involved in the murder of Prince Mansour bin Muqrin Al Saud, who was killed in an aviation accident in November 2017, and a son of Muqrin bin Abdulaziz, who was briefly Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia in 2015. Other royals arrested or detained or who remain under house arrest include: Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal, Prince Fahd bin Abdullah bin Mohammed Al Saud, Queen Fahda bint Falah (mother of MBS), Prince Khaled bin Talai, Prince Mohammed bin Nayef (MBN, former Crown Prince), MBN’s uncle Ahmed, MBN’s half-brother Nawwaf, Prince Mutaib bin Abdullah, Princess Reem bint al-Waleed bin Talai, Prince Turki bin Abdullah, Prince Faisal bin Abdullah, Prince Mishaal bin Abdullah, Prince Turki bin Nasser, Prince Turki bin Mohammed bin Saud Al-Kabeer. Uncertain ending status is Prince Abdul Aziz bin Fahd, and Prince Mansour bin Muqrin. Sanctioned is Prince Bandar bin Sultan. Various politicians and military officers have been detained or died in custody.

Additionally a number of Saudi businessmen and professionals have been detained, including Khaled Abdullah Almolhem, former head of Saudi Arabian Airlines; Mohammed Hussein Al Amoudi, Ethio-Saudi billionaire businessman; Saleh Abdullah Kamel, billionaire owner of Arab Radio and Television Network; Waleed bin Ibrahim Al Ibrahim, billionaire businessman and brother of King Fahd, and chairman of Middle East Broadcasting Company (MBC); Dr. Walid Fitaihi, MPH. A growing number of Islamic scholars and media figures have also been detained and/or assassinated. Women activists have also been fair-game as recorded in a number of 2018 women’s rights activists arrests. The detainees are subject to beatings, torture, intimidation, coercion, and beheading, with unknown status for Saudi cleric Awad Al-Qarni, while his son escaped to the UK.

The most recent purge occurred in March 2020, according to the Middle East Eye, and MBS accused his uncle, Prince Ahmed bin Abdulaliz Al Saud, the brother of King Salman (MBS’s father) of plotting a coup against MBS. Up to 20 princes have been arrested, including many from Prince Ahmed’s family and circle of influence, and they may have to pay huge settlement fees.

Due to threats or bribes, the Western coverage of MBS is mostly favorable, and the fawning by President Trump and the “Tech Bro’s” over MBS is receiving great press coverage, even though they may not want to hang out too long at the Ritz-Carlton hotel in Riyadh. But it is the nature of the billionaire class to believe the rules will always bend in their favor, and this also applies to the “Tech Bro’s” investment in nuclear energy, irregardless of how much money is required in such a generally poor return on investment, that they will create a new Oasis in the Desert. This illusion, which is reminiscent of the Schiller Institute’s Oasis Plan for Gaza, probably includes things like desalination plants fueled by small nuclear reactors (SMRs). The fascination of nuclear always is used to bait humankind because it is the source for refining nuclear fuel for fabrication of nuclear weapons.

Officially the Technocrats support nuclear power investments because SMRs or Fusion Energy or renovating American Nuclear Power Plants (such as at Three Mile Island) will provide a “great clean energy fuel source” for the massive data server centers that are required in quantum computing, to power 6G roboticized factories, to mine BitCoin, to harvest the growing data of the billions of people on the planet, so it can be used to feed ever-expanding predictive AI-type massive computer systems (such as Aladdin).

The trouble is that firstly, in the case of Lebanon and Gaza, the management of the land which is now highly valued due to offshore gas reserves, belongs to the Palestinians. They have the right to self-rule and determine how they want to live, whether they want this or that type of energy, or port, or investment. Secondly, the same holds with any sovereign nation, although under the financial oligarchy, an autocrat can dispense with regulations or alter permits, or even dispense with food, building, and environmental safety. Ultimately the goal is to allow the “Tech Bro’s” to develop however they want to, free of public scrutiny, reviews, permits, or payment of fees, let alone payment of taxes.

Meanwhile they can monetize and financialize over the speculative prospects of the proposed SMRs, which may take up to a generation to be built, and require hundreds of billions of dollars to construct. Key companies visiting Riyadh, Qatar, or the UAE with nuclear-related interests include GE, DataVolt, Nvidia, OpenAI, Amazon, Alphabet, Meta, Microsoft, Honeywell, Northrup Grumman, General Dynamics, Bechtel, Lockheed Martin, and BAE Systems. For instance, because the UAE is a trusted Abraham Accords signatory, it is further along in entrustment with AI, data center development, energy and financialization schemes. This is why Qualcomm is heavily investing in expanding its global innovation footprint in Abu Dhabi with a new Global Engineering Center that will focus on AI, data centers, and industrial Internet-of-Things. They aim for cutting edge collaboration in “advanced connectivity, edge AI, and cloud computing solutions.” Sizzling news also comes with regard to the MOU signed with Nvidia to allow the UAE to import 500,000 of the most advanced AI chips every year through 2027. Whether or not all these MOUs and deals come to fruition, there are critics who expresss concerns over potential waste, fraud, and abuse—the very thing DOGE was supposed to stand up against, but stopped once it came close to auditing the Department of Defense.

Constructive Criticism Standouts

One which stands out of concern is expressed by Leo Hohmann, an independent journalist, that there is little benefit for the “little people.” In his speeches at the GCC and onstage, Trump did repeatedly emphasize that jobs will appear on American soil, up to 2 million jobs for Americans from these new deals. What kind of deals when these technocrats dream of replacing human labor with robots? What kind of deal when these Arab autocrats, especially al-Sharaa of Syria, justify the killing of non-Sunni-Islamists as okay? Won’t the best jobs even in the U.S. go to foreign nationals on H1B visas, because they are willing to work as indentured servants? The AI-Revolution is the very definition of fulfilling the New World Order in which those humans who survive will be categorized and managed like cattle, their digital footprints studied, their caloric intake measured, their needs minimized in order to maximize Universal Basic Income award efficiency. The Lilliputians will be paid in crytocurrency but can earn some extra income via blockchain, just as David Sacks, the White House Crypto and AI Czar envisions. Step out of line, be flagged as a dissident, identified as any kind of trouble, and you will be detained, interned, tortured, so endemic in the Middle East today.

But another concern is the rank potential for financialization of corruption, which Environmentalist Dana Durnford, TheNuclearProctologist.org, brings up in several of his podcasts earlier this year. Fourteen financial institutions were encouraged by COP29 to routinely pump up nuclear energy as clean energy. Various small modular reactor (SMR) startups hold public stock even though they have no working material wealth ie. working small modular reactors. “Tech Bro” companies need massive amounts of energy for their AI apps and server plantations, so they are throwing their weight behind nuclear power, including Amazon, Microsoft, Alphabet, and lately Nvidia. This serves as bait for small investors who lose their money when the stock value invariably drops. Nevertheless these ponzi-like schemes continue, with the financial institutions buying shares to artificially float values, creating cash flow for the companies (such as Vistra Energy, Constellation Energy, Nano Nuclear, NuScale, Cameco, GE Vernova, Southern Company) for building nuclear infrastructure. The issue again is that as many as a hundred of these SMR-related companies do not hold significant material wealth ie. they have no working small modular reactors. But this is what may be referred to at the Saudi-U.S. Investment Forum in panels such as “Driving the Energy Transition: Practical Solutions for a Lower-Carbon Future” or “Navigating the Energy Transition: Policy, Markets, and Global Impact.” Nuclear power industry with its very low cost-of-return for utility is surviving by riding the speculation waves, but there is no DOGE, no U.S. President ready to hold these sorts of public-private energy departments accountable, ready to save small investors who will lose their life savings in many more pump-and-dump cycles.

Photo from Saudi-U.S. Investment Forum, program notes, sources also from WhiteHouse.gov, USA Today, Substack, SPA.gov.sa, AAwsat.com, etc.

Op-Ed Article by Christine H. Kroll, P.E., M.A.