EconTalk · Russ Roberts

The Man Who Would Be King of Saudi Arabia (with Karen Elliott House)

February 23, 2026·1 hr 17 min·5 clips

MBS told ministers to dismantle Saudi Arabia's entire government bureaucracy—and finish by tomorrow morning.

The portrait begins with succession. Roberts introduces Mohammed bin Salman as King Salman's son, Saudi Arabia's thirty-nine-year-old crown prince, and already much more than a prince in waiting. House keeps the story grounded. Her account, at least in the excerpt, follows how power moved through family, religion, popular culture, and money. The religious police have been neutralized. Roberts treats that as an abrupt social reversal, not a small change in official manners. Women driving becomes the emblem. House and Roberts connect the 2018 freedom to drive with wider changes in work, dress, and public life. The cultural surface has changed too. Rock concerts, amusement parks, sporting events, golf ambitions, and Ronaldo's Saudi league appearance all point to a society suddenly courting mass entertainment. House does not oversell the public mood. She describes Saudis as generally undemonstrative, used to accepting the ruler's place within a political and religious order. That restraint matters. Public criticism, as she explains it, is bounded by Islamic expectations, which make private counsel safer than open challenge. Generational change adds pressure. Younger Saudis, including the large cohort below thirty, grew up under religious rigidity while seeing other ways of living online. MBS is not flattened into a simple figure. In House's telling, he knows Sharia well enough to be less intimidated by clerical resistance. The optimism stays conditional. The closing test is whether his second decade can move from announcing plans and spending money to executing plans and earning it.

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