Public Investment Fund of Saudi Arabia

The commitment the skeptics lost

In the summer of 2021, Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund committed $2 billion to Affinity Partners, the private equity firm Jared Kushner had formed after leaving the White House (Arab News). According to New York Times reporting carried by Arab News, Kushner traveled multiple times to the Middle East to secure the deal, was rebuffed by Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, and faced reluctance inside the Public Investment Fund itself: the PIF was “initially reluctant to support Kushner’s fund, citing his lack of experience” (Arab News).

The board signed anyway. “The board of the PIF finally decided to sign the deal,” the report noted — an understatement that covers one of the most consequential capital allocations in modern sovereign-wealth history (Arab News). That single commitment would become the seed of a firm whose Gulf-funded money now reaches, among other places, an Israeli insurance giant.

From passive holding vehicle to Vision 2030 engine

The Public Investment Fund began in 1971 as a vehicle for financing development projects, and for decades it “maintained a low-profile portfolio” as a passive holder of the Saudi state’s equity stakes in domestic companies (AFP). Everything changed with a 2015 cabinet resolution that reconstituted its board and named Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman chairman — a change the fund’s own website describes as being “reborn” (AFP).

The reborn PIF became the primary financial vehicle of Vision 2030, the crown prince’s reform agenda for diversifying the oil-reliant economy (AFP). As Saudi political analyst Sulaiman al-Oqaily put it, the idea was to create “an alternative oil field” that would facilitate Saudi Arabia’s transition away from fossil fuels, on the logic that “if they dried up one day,” the fund’s returns would replace oil revenue (AFP). The fund was told to build companies with returns — to turn the kingdom from “a resource-dependent state to a productive state” (AFP).

The scale is difficult to overstate. By the time AFP profiled the fund in 2023, the PIF boasted assets under management exceeding $700 billion and said it had created more than 560,000 “direct and indirect” jobs (AFP). The crown prince had said he wanted the fund to reach $1 trillion in assets by the end of 2025 (AFP).

The global portfolio

The PIF made its biggest international splash in sports. Its 2021 takeover of Newcastle United was followed by a Saudi football push that lured megastars like Cristiano Ronaldo, Karim Benzema, and Neymar to the Saudi Pro League on contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars (AFP). The fund also acquired 75-percent stakes in four elite local squads — Al-Nassr, Al-Hilal, Al-Ittihad, and Al-Ahli (AFP). Beyond football, the PIF funded the LIV Golf circuit, which emerged as a rival to the PGA Tour before a shock 2023 merger agreement (AFP).

Its foreign corporate stakes include Uber, electric car maker Lucid, and video game company Activision Blizzard (AFP). Domestic investments constitute 77 percent of the fund’s portfolio, according to its annual report — and the domestic work is where Vision 2030 will ultimately be judged (AFP). The centerpiece giga-projects include NEOM, the $500 billion futuristic megacity planned around 170 kilometers of mirror-encased skyscrapers called The Line, and PIF-owned Riyadh Air, unveiled to turn the capital into a global travel hub (AFP).

Analysts have raised a consistent concern: the PIF’s unmatched resources mean it can crowd out private-sector actors in local markets. “How the PIF enters local markets and industries is ultimately less important than how it steers these new entities and then how the fund exits,” Robert Mogielnicki of the Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington told AFP (AFP).

Where the $2 billion went

The Affinity commitment did not stay still. “The fund was seeded with $2 billion in commitments from Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, according to US congressional records and news reports,” AGBI noted in a January 2026 analysis; by then Affinity had “almost $5 billion in assets under management” (AGBI). In 2024 it received “another Gulf boost” when Abu Dhabi-based Lunate and the Qatar Investment Authority put in $1.5 billion, Reuters reported (AGBI).

From 2021 to 2023, Affinity generated $87 million in fees from Saudi Arabia alone, “according to data cited by US Democratic senator Ron Wyden in a 2024 request for company records” (AGBI). Wyden’s letter also criticized the company’s “failure to deploy capital in a timely fashion while charging excessive fees” (AGBI).

The money trail runs through some surprising places. Affinity holds 10 percent of Israeli financial services company Phoenix Holdings — the Israeli insurer, per Israeli publisher CTech as cited by AGBI in early 2026 (AGBI). In other words, Saudi sovereign capital seeded by the PIF sits, via a Miami private equity firm, atop an Israeli insurer’s shareholder register. Responding to regional reporting, Affinity said its investors “are passive, meaning they have no role in Affinity’s or Phoenix’s operations” (AGBI).

The thread continued into 2026. In late 2025, Affinity joined a consortium acquiring U.S. video-game developer Electronic Arts; “PIF controls nearly all of the vehicle,” with U.S. private equity firm Silver Lake as the third party, and Kushner “introduced PIF to EA and led backroom talks for months,” according to Bloomberg reporting cited by AGBI (AGBI).

Analysts describe this as something new in statecraft. “Affinity matters because it helped normalise a particular model: Gulf sovereign money paired with a US political operator to gain deal access and influence, not just portfolio exposure,” said Andreas Krieg of King’s College London (AGBI). Krieg cautioned, though, that political linkage “can become a liability for Gulf stakeholders if US political winds shift towards a tougher posture on foreign influence” (AGBI).

What this profile does not claim

This profile does not claim that Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman personally overruled PIF officials on the Affinity commitment — the verified record says only that PIF was initially reluctant and the board then signed. It does not assert an exact current figure for assets under management, which competing trackers report differently. It does not resolve whether Affinity was established in January or July 2021, stating only the year. It does not claim the Electronic Arts consortium deal closed or specify its final value. And it treats Affinity’s “passive investor” characterization as the company’s stated position, not an independently verified fact.