In 2014 I wrote a book, “The Saudi Kingdom,” that was, frankly, pessimistic about Saudi Arabia’s long-term prospects. After decades under a geriatric leadership class that had done too little for too long, I concluded with a blunt prescription: the Kingdom needed a strong reformist leader—someone willing to restructure the entire system, society, and economy.
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In January 2015, King Salman Bin Abdulaziz Al Saud acceded to the throne and promptly empowered his son, Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS), to launch a far-reaching program of reform. This August, MBS turned 40—having completed a decade in power since taking on core portfolios in 2015—and the Saudi Arabia of today is almost unrecognizable from the country I wrote about a mere 11 years ago.
To understand the distance traveled, it helps to start with a personal memory. In the 1990s, when I was a banker living in Riyadh, sports for girls were banned in schools under pressure from religious leaders. I eventually pulled my 9-year-old daughter out of Saudi Arabia and moved her to Dubai so she could study—and play sports—like any other child. That painful choice distilled the limits of the old order: we were constraining half our population by misguided religious ideas.
A great transformation
In 2017, MBS re-introduced physical education for girls in schools. What once forced me to relocate my daughter is now ordinary life for Saudi families. Public space has been re-engineered. The religious police—once able to stop, chase, and arrest people—were stripped of those powers by MBS in 2016, and the change in street-level atmosphere was immediate. Cinemas, shuttered for nearly four decades, reopened in 2018; now a weekend outing to the movies or a concert is unremarkable.
Travel to the country once limited essentially to pilgrimage and business travel, opened with a tourist e-visa in 2019 and has since become an engine of jobs and investment. In 2024 Saudi Arabia reported a record 30 million foreign tourists, part of a broader strategy to attract private capital into hotels, entertainment, and heritage sites.
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The most consequential shift, in my view, is the role of women in Saudi society. In 2019, MBS changed the government’s policy so that women no longer need a male guardian’s permission to work, travel, or operate in society—a reform that, together with women finally being allowed to drive, transformed daily life. The result has been a surge of female talent across sectors once closed to them: law, aviation, hospitality, retail, finance, and even the military.
The World Bank estimates that the female labor-force participation rate in Saudi Arabia is now roughly 35%—a doubling of the female work participation rate in less than a decade, with tangible effects on household incomes and economic productivity. When I walk through airports, banks, and ministries today and see mixed teams working matter-of-factly together, I’m reminded how unimaginable this was in 2014.
A new economic focus
Economic reform has been no less disruptive. In 2016, MBS launched Vision 2030, a comprehensive plan to totally restructure the economy and society. This began with fiscal reform. For decades, subsidies on fuel, electricity, and water encouraged massive waste and drained Saudi Arabia’s budget. In 2016, the government began to reprice energy and utilities and, to protect vulnerable households, launched a cash transfer program to help the poor directly cope. The state then adopted VAT in 2018 and, amid the COVID-19 pandemic, tripled it to 15% in 2020—politically painful, fiscally necessary. The International Monetary Fund in a September 2024 assessment described robust non-oil activity, contained inflation, record-low unemployment, and ample buffers—while urging a prudent calibration of the investment tempo to avoid overheating.
Those wise and difficult choices created room for constructive bets. The Kingdom has poured resources into logistics, mining, renewables, technology, creative industries, and advanced manufacturing—aiming to be a producer, not merely a consumer, of sophisticated goods and services.
In the past decade MBS has also initiated several extraordinarily ambitious projects—NEOM, a new high-tech city; Diriyah, a vast renovation and development of the historic capital of the Al Saud; the Red Sea Projects involving multiple tourism developments on the Red sea; and Qiddiya, a large entertainment and sports city. These projects are often caricatured, but their strategic logic is clear: build new clusters, catalyze supply chains and skills, and crowd in private capital. Even with inevitable rescheduling or scaling back in parts, the overall diversification path is intact.
Sports and nation building
One under-reported way in which Saudi Arabia has changed is health through sport. MBS effectively adopted “sport” as a mission of government—not just the spectacle of Formula 1 or heavyweight bouts, but everyday participation. Authorities set a target to lift weekly physical-activity rates to 40% by 2030. This has been widely successful and the country has already seen citizen participation in sports jump from roughly 13% in 2015 to over 48% by 2022 . This isn’t cosmetic. Reintroducing girls’ physical education in 2017 normalized movement for half the population and built a pipeline of coaches, women’s sports leagues, and female athletes.
The emphasis on sports includes e-sports which engage attention, memory, visuo-motor coordination, and teamwork under pressure. Advocates in the education community stress benefits in teamwork, communication, problem-solving, and strategic thinking. That cognitive and social dimension is one reason Saudi Arabia launched the Esports World Cup in Riyadh in 2024.
Reopening the country has amplified these social and economic shifts. The e-visa in 2019 was a historic turn, and in 2024 Saudi Arabia reported record inbound spending and a travel-services surplus—outcomes you only achieve when airlines, hotels, and attractions all scale together. On the world stage, the Kingdom secured hosting Expo 2030 and the FIFA World Cup 2034—platforms that will keep the Kingdom in the spotlight for years.
Foreign policy has moved in lockstep with domestic modernization: more proactive, more conciliatory, and more comfortable in a multipolar world. Riyadh hosted high-level talks on Ukraine in 2023 that drew more than 40 countries and has taken on an often-frustrating mediation track on Sudan with its partners. On the Israel/Palestine conflict, MBS has also taken a lead insisting that a credible path for a Palestinians state must be put in place before the Kingdom can normalize with Israel.
MBS and the Saudi future
None of this is to deny that missteps occurred, or that concerns about political liberties and freedom of the press in Saudi Arabia are unfounded. A leader moving at MBS’s speed will, inevitably, disrupt entrenched interests and habits. But a decade on, the balance sheet is unmistakable: the Kingdom is safer, more dynamic, more livable, and more competitive than the Saudi Arabia I assessed in 2014.
Credit markets and ratings agencies—whose job is to be cold-eyed about risk—have registered that transformation: Moody’s upgraded the sovereign to Aa3 in Nov. 2024, S&P raised the Kingdom to A+ in March 2025, and Fitch affirmed A+ with a stable outlook in July 2025. These are not vanity metrics; they lower borrowing costs, attract capital, and validate the macro framework underpinning Vision 2030.
For me, the contrast remains deeply personal. While I had to move my daughter out of Riyadh because she couldn’t play sports; today, schoolgirls jog in public parks in front of parents who would never have imagined such a scene. I once warned that an economy dependent on cheap inputs and blanket subsidies would atrophy; today, industries watch costs, companies push productivity, and young Saudis start businesses that develop into tech unicorns in sectors that barely existed a few years ago. I once feared Saudi would stagnate behind walls; today tourists queue at restored heritage sites while the world’s best athletes, artists, and coders fly in and out of its cities whose skylines change by the month.
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At 40, Mohammed bin Salman could govern for decades. That longevity is strategic. Leaders like Turkey’s Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew, and China’s Deng Xiaoping reshaped their nations because they mixed audacity with institutionalization—and stayed long enough to embed change. The Kingdom has completed phase one of his plan: shock therapy. The challenge now is phase two: to build on these reforms and give them institutional depth so no future government can easily unwind them.
If the Kingdom locks those reforms in while sustaining a realistic pace on its mega-projects and widening space for constructive debate, the payoff will extend far beyond its borders to a more stable and economically productive Arab region better able to compete in the world. As someone who argued in 2014 that only a strong reformist could arrest drift and rebuild the Saudi state, I didn’t expect the shift to arrive this fast—or to touch so many dimensions of life so deeply. But here we are.