Saudi Prince's rise to power turns him into a billionaire boss

He became not only the de facto political leader of the petro-state but the unrivaled billionaire boss of a sprawling family firm with more money than almost any other dynasty on the planet

It was an unprecedented move against once-inviolable power figures in the kingdom, framed as a crackdown on corruption.

To pull it off, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman turned the marble-floored Ritz-Carlton in Riyadh into a prison in November 2017 for hundreds of men. Many of the captives—some of them his relatives and princes in their own rights—were released only after agreeing to sign over to the government assets including land, cash and business stakes. The total recovered, Saudi authorities said, was some $107 billion.

That sensational show of power upended decades of unwritten rules within the secretive House of Saud and effectively