Saudi Arabia's millennial crown prince got a rare tour of the inside

mofa.gov.sa

Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has been visiting with Silicon Valley leaders and top tech executives during his American tour.
He met with Apple CEO Tim Cook, Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Google founder Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, venture capitalists Marc Andreessen and Peter Thiel, and other key players in the technology industry.
He even got an extremely rare tour of the inside of the $ 5 billion Apple Park campus, including facetime with Apple CEO Tim Cook and other executives.

Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, now the driving force behind his kingdom, spent the past week touring the United States and meeting important American officials, celebrities, and businessmen.

In 2018, any whistle-stop tour of the seats of American power means taking time to meet the major players of Silicon Valley.

The young prince, often referred to as MbS, was on a charm offensive, according to the New York Times. His goal was to change the western perspective of Saudi Arabia as a conservative country where women are treated as second-class people dependent on oil money. Instead, MbS wants Americans to see Saudi Arabia as a modern country with extensive investments in growth markets like technology.

All of which explains why the prince dropped by Silicon Valley late last week to meet with the CEOs of Apple and Google. (His American tour also involved a stop in Seattle, where he met with Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and Microsoft founder Bill Gates, according to the Times.)

He even got to see the inside of Apple’s new $ 5 billion campus, Apple Park, which Apple CEO Tim Cook said earlier this year won’t be allowing tours for Apple fans because there is “so much confidential stuff around.”

While at Apple, he discussed developing applications in Saudi Arabia and new Arabic-language educational content, according to a Saudi press release. He also got to discuss education, health, and marketing, culminating in a presentation at the Steve Jobs Theater, where he received a presentation on Apple’s “modern voice applications,” according to the Saudi Press Agency.

At Google, the prince met with cofounders Larry Page, Sergey Brin, and Google CEO Sundar Pichai, according to the Saudi Press Agency. He was briefed about Google’s “electronic cloud, artificial intelligence and automatics learning,” according to the press release. They discussed ways to cooperate on cyber security.

The prince also took some time to sit down with some of technology’s top investors, including Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen, Sam Altman, and Vinod Khosla.

While no major initiatives were announced with Apple nor Google, the Saudi delegation got a lot of great photographs of the prince hanging out with some of the United States’ most successful technology entrepreneurs.