Pablo Torre

But in April, the Saudi Public Investment Fund finally presented its new five-year plan, a plan which focused on, quote, maximizing financial returns and strengthening investment efficiency.

sounding more like McKinsey than the money waterfall that would eternally keep sports properties in America going up and to the right.

In fact, this plan ultimately reduced Saudi Arabia's international investments by 10%, at which point I started monitoring what the sports industry was thinking about the war in Iran.

The theory was we're going to diversify our portfolio as a country.

as a sovereign wealth fund from just oil into all of these things.

And sports was seemingly going to be their main artery towards that.

And yet, as all of this was happening, it turns out, oh, right.

But the way to buy up all of those things, to fund all of those things was with oil.

Yeah.

And...

But I wonder if this has said to you anything about what the ceiling was for this project to begin with.

I want to get to the sort of timeline here in a second, but yeah, look, one of the most famous quotes was the one that you got from Phil Mickelson that he resented and continues to resent, I can only imagine, because he said to you as you're writing your book on him,

Quote, we know they killed Khashoggi and have a horrible record on human rights.

They execute people over there for being gay.

Knowing all of this, why would I even consider it?

Because this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to reshape how the PGA Tour operates.

And so, again, in that infamous quote about the scary motherfuckers, as he calls them, that are the Saudi authorities, there was already this notion of, yes, but there is a transaction that is worth it.

What's interesting to me is the plan and the strategy and who are the parties who most could use a partner like Saudi Arabia.

And so I bring it back to Vision 2030.

And that was Saudi Arabia's grand plan.