A Saudi family business invested early in Anthropic & xAI
Almoammar MIS' investments in AI, Gstaad Guy, Saudi’s newest billionaire, why Netflix is soulless, Kuwaiti Boutiqaat’s IPO, Phoebe Gates’ investor lineup, and more.
Good morning,
I took a Gulf Air flight from Bahrain to New York last night entirely because it was the cheapest business class ticket I could find. I arrived to an unusually empty customs line at JFK. Took an Uber to SoHo, where I “checked in” to my stay for the week at a very artsy studio apartment on Sullivan Street. I rented it from my friend, Joshua, who charged me $200/night + a cleaning fee. Highly American of him, and highly un-Saudi of me.
This is the apartment:
Arguably, this is by far the cheapest thing anyone could find in lower manhattan. The host was showing me the “lay of the land” in his 350 square foot apartment before he so pridefully (and falsely) stated:
New York isn’t America.
The thing about a lot of my New Yorker friends is that they try so hard to dissociate themselves from American patriotism and live in the very false idea that New York is a branch of Europe or something. New Yorkers love to voice their un-Americanness but everything about New York is, at its core, strictly American: the work, the lust for life, and the constant need to create and fail (and create again and fail again).
In the best way possible, New York is the most American place in the world. It would cease to exist were it not for its Americanism. I guess what I’m trying to say is that I love this city so much, and I still get a pang every time I visit and realize that I don’t live here anymore.
Although… I did go grocery shopping at Trader Joe’s last night with the intention of buying some breakfast items. I walked through the frozen food section and, as if it were a near-death experience, I flashed upon every frozen food item that I had for dinner by myself over the course of the entire three years that I lived here. I paused at this frozen cod thing with rice that I would pop into the microwave for 7 minutes (!!), which I used to eat for dinner at least three nights a week. That is fucking disgusting, and so maybe it’s not so bad that I left. No wonder I was so sick all the time. So puffy and exhausted and out of shape.
But here’s the thing: you could be unhealthy, overworked, tired—and still be very, very happy. That was me in New York. I love this toxic ex of a city so much.
Anyway, we have a lot of news to cover today:
Today’s letter includes: Saudi Mo3ammar Family’s Anthropic investment, Gstaad Guy, Saudi’s newest billionaire, why Netflix is soulless, Kuwaiti Boutiqat’s IPO, Phoebe Gates’ investor lineup, and more.
Al Moammar Information Systems, a publicly traded Saudi family business, was among the early investors in Anthropic and xAI. Everyone is talking about why this company exited so early, but what I’m most interested in is how they made such an investment? I can’t think of any other entity or person in the Gulf who has done what the Moammars did. The Wolf of TASI, among others, compared their strategy with Spark’s Yasmin Rasavi, who invested much larger sums and did not exit (yet). But I think it’s more honorable for a Saudi family company with limited exposure to the Silicon Valley scene to endure such ventures than an HBS-educated McKinsey/VC alum careerist slop based in the Bay Area. So I did some digging on MIS and here’s what I found:
