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While Bezos occupies a unique dual position as the owner of the Post and Amazon, many other technology companies have forged close relationships with the kingdom.
Last year, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman toured the United States and met with many technical officials, including Bezos, Alphabet President Sergey Brin, and Apple CEO Tim Cook.
Apple reportedly opened stores in the country and Microsoft announced a cloud computing product in Saudi Arabia earlier this year with local partners. In his blog, Microsoft estimates that the cloud computing market rises to nearly $ 29 billion ", due to the strong tendency of Saudi government agencies to leverage this technology to reach the goals of the digital transformation and contribute to the realization of the 2030 vision, "which is the great plan of the crown prince to make the kingdom a" power of investment ".
Apple and Microsoft declined to comment.
In addition, Saudi money is now everywhere in Silicon Valley. The country's public investment fund has committed $ 45 billion in the first Softbank Vision Fund, and Crown Prince Mohammed has recently announced that he would invest a similar amount in the next fund. Through the Vision Fund, which also includes Apple and Qualcomm as investors, Softbank holds huge holdings in Uber, WeWork, DoorDash and many other highly regarded companies.
Marcelo Claure, chief operating officer of Softbank, said at a conference on Tuesday that the company was monitoring the situation and was not ready to make a decision at this point.
"Like most companies that have relations with Saudi Arabia, we are monitoring the situation and see where it will take us," said Claure. "Right now, things are going as usual and we continue to manage our company, our funds."
In addition, CB Insights has just released a list of technology companies that have received direct Saudi investments. They include Tesla, Magic Leap, Uber and Lyft.
