What's Next for Saudi Arabia's Sovereign Wealth Fund

It’s been a year of aggressive dealmaking for Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund, the Public Investment Fund, or PIF. But a delay in the planned public offering of state-owned Saudi Arabian Oil Co. -- Saudi Aramco -- means the PIF won’t immediately receive an expected $100 billion in extra capital to invest. And amid the global furor over the killing of prominent Saudi critic Jamal Khashoggi, senior bankers and businessmen including the heads of Blackstone Group LP, BlackRock Inc., Uber Technologies Inc. and Virgin Group pulled out of the PIF’s forum, the Future Investment Initiative, which begins on Tuesday. It’s still unclear what this will mean for future PIF investments.

It’s heavily involved in transportation technology, with a 5 percent stake in electric car-maker Tesla Inc., valued at around $2 billion; $1 billion in Tesla’s aspiring rival, Lucid Motors Inc.; and a $3.5 billion stake in taxi-hailing firm Uber. It has announced that it will commit as much as $20 billion to a U.S. infrastructure fund run by Blackstone Group LP, build three cities (Neom, Red Sea and Amaala) on the Red Sea coast and set up a $1.1 billion fund to support small and medium-sized enterprises. The PIF has committed $45 billion to SoftBank Group Corp.’s technology-focused Vision Fund, and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who controls the PIF, said in early October that it will put an investment of that same size in a second SoftBank fund. The PIF expects to deploy about $170 billion over the next three-to-four years.