By Jenny Braddock, Senior D.C. Realist
April 29, 2025
Yasir Al-Rumayyan is a man of modest means. Just ask Wikipedia — they’ll tell you he’s worth a humble $26 million, a solid little nest egg for a guy whose day job involves supervising almost a trillion dollars.
That’s adorable. That’s like saying Jeff Bezos is a passionate bookstore clerk.
In reality, Al-Rumayyan is the chairman of Saudi Aramco, the most profitable company in human history. He’s also governor of the Public Investment Fund of Saudi Arabia, with $930 billion under management — nearly one-tenth of all the sovereign wealth on Earth. He owns Newcastle United, arguably England’s most emotionally unstable football club. He’s the architect and wallet behind LIV Golf, the upstart tour that’s now basically a cash-stuffed middle finger to the PGA — and conveniently, a mainstay on Trump-owned golf courses.
And if you’re looking for something more ambitious? He’s helping bankroll NEOM, a $500 billion sci-fi city in the desert with mirrored skyscrapers, vertical farming, and a surveillance grid that would make Jeff Bezos blush — but sure, $26 million.
So no — Yasir isn’t some oil technocrat. He’s the Broligarch’s Broligarch. A master of ceremonies in the global sport of buying legitimacy with money nobody’s allowed to talk about.
He doesn’t just move through institutions. He owns them. In some cases literally. In others, spiritually. At Aramco, he sits atop the carbon throne — and carefully avoids stories about the collapse of the Thwaites ice shelf. At PIF, he bankrolls everything from Silicon Valley startups to esports leagues to gig economy facial recognition software you’ll probably read about five years too late. At Newcastle, he inherited a fan base that’s learned to live without shame, and gave them back a team with gold-plated cleats and the moral flexibility of a Premier League boardroom.
And he knew exactly how to package it. Unlike many of his peers in Riyadh, Al-Rumayyan doesn’t show up in flowing robes or national dress. He almost always wears tailored Western suits — a man who could just as easily pass for a tech CFO or a private equity shark. His job isn’t to disrupt the order. It’s to make sure the old one keeps running on new money.
And at LIV? He gave washed-up golfers a second act, rebranded human rights laundering as innovation, and got Donald Trump to tee off next to men who would’ve had their hands shaken by Henry Kissinger if he hadn’t finally quit the simulation.
Al-Rumayyan is not rich like you understand rich. He doesn’t “own things.” He directs capital — at scale. He’s not some nouveau-riche flashball. He’s the state’s muscle in a Tom Ford suit. His job isn’t to flaunt the wealth. His job is to deploy it — tactically, globally, and with just enough plausible deniability to keep the Financial Times writing it up as strategy instead of sovereignty theater.
He doesn’t need to show wealth. His signature is where the money goes next. You’ll find it in IPO prospectuses, in influencer golf clips, in Premier League rebrands and in whispered meetings with the PGA tour and Trump allies in Dubai hotel ballrooms. When the West fell out of love with its own institutions, Yasir didn’t blink. He bought them.
He’s not some Bond villain with a laser and a dream. He’s worse.
He’s reasonable.
He’s charming.
He’s the kind of man who can explain a 12-figure capital injection with the same tone you’d use to order a sparkling water.
He’s the polite, well-tailored face that helps the world forget Jamal Khashoggi’s body was dismembered in an embassy.
Not because he planned it — but because his presence makes the system stop asking who did.
And he’s not hiding. He’s clinking glasses with Jared Kushner and workshopping breakout LIV TikTok reels. (What’s in his glass, exactly? Alcohol is technically forbidden under Islam — but with Riyadh opening its first liquor store for foreign diplomats, well… anything’s possible.) He’s shaking hands at Trump National and pretending this is all perfectly normal — because by now, it is.
So yes — Yasir Al-Rumayyan is our Bloligarch of the Month.
He follows in the flaming hoverbootsteps of last month’s pick, Elon Musk, whose techno-kingdom continues to spiral somewhere between Mars and Reddit.
Not because Yasir’s the richest. Not because he’s the most terrifying. But because he might be the new normal: the international face of the old boys’ club 2.0, updated for maximum yield and minimal friction.
He doesn’t just play the game. He owns the course. And if you’re reading this on a phone subsidized by a fund he controls, while watching a league he bankrolls, or rooting for a team he purchased, that’s not a glitch.
That’s the future.
And in the spirit of that long-running Esquire feature where aging icons pretend to be introspective, we now present:
Things Yasir Al-Rumayyan Has Probably Learned
(As imagined by Jenny Braddock, transcribed from a conversation that definitely never happened on the 14th green at Trump Doral)
- A $26 million net worth is the financial equivalent of camouflage.
- Newcastle fans are passionate, loyal, and very good at forgetting where the money came from.
- If you host a golf tournament at the right Trump property, no one asks why.
- Mergers are diplomacy for men who don’t like speeches.
- “Western values” are negotiable, especially with preferred equity.
- You don’t need to own the media if you can sponsor the event.
- Silence is underrated. It keeps the focus on the yield.
Filed from the back nine of the post-Western order, where the flags are for sale, the sand traps are tax havens, and Yasir’s already won.
