Good morning from Riyadh, where I’m attending the eighth annual conference of the Future Investment Initiative (FII) Institute. This is a nonprofit foundation backed by Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF) that’s popular with global leaders in tech and finance, many of whom have partnered with the kingdom in some way.
Some highlights include a conversation with TikTok CEO Chew Shou Zi, whose platform has been so vilified in the U.S. that I feel we never get to hear about his actual business. (Zhang Yiming, cofounder of TikTok’s parent company ByteDance, is now the richest person in China.) Ditto for Masayoshi Son of SoftBank, whose bold bets and business philosophy have made him one of the most enigmatic investors of our time. Son believes Nvidia is undervalued and humans are entering a golden era where robots will do the work—he’s about to open a factory with the Saudis to build them. Will that propel us towards delight or disaster? Watch the interview here.
