SpaceX IPO Won't Fix Kingdom Holding's Two-Decade Discount Problem

Saudi billionaire Prince Alwaleed bin Talal has long been celebrated as the Middle East's premier investor, with early winning bets on Apple, Amazon, Citigroup, and Twitter. His latest trophy is SpaceX — a $4.47 billion position held through Kingdom Holding, his listed conglomerate. But despite that marquee portfolio, Kingdom Holding's stock has barely budged from its 2007 IPO price, and the SpaceX listing isn't expected to close that gap.

The excitement around SpaceX briefly lit a fire under Kingdom Holding shares. A late-May report suggested the combined stake — including Alwaleed's personal holdings — could be worth over $10 billion if SpaceX IPOs at a $1.75 trillion valuation. Investors piled in, sending the stock to its highest level in over a decade. Then Kingdom Holding clarified the reality: its own corporate stake would be worth 21.3 billion riyals ($5.67 billion) at that valuation — a significantly smaller figure than the headline suggested. The stock cratered as much as 9% in a single session and kept falling.

The company's fundamental problem traces back to the 2008 financial crisis, which hit shortly after its IPO and triggered a nearly 31 billion riyal quarterly loss. Kingdom Holding never fully recovered, and its business model has compounded the damage — spreading capital across legacy financial institutions, mature hotel brands like Four Seasons, Lyft, and media properties across four continents. The portfolio looks prestigious but has delivered returns that, by one assessment, lagged a basic savings account over the long run.

Alwaleed has gone on social media to defend himself, arguing that Kingdom Holding shares trade well below net asset value and should be more than double their current price. But the market has discounted that gap for most of the company's listed history, and investors appear skeptical it will close. The core critique is structural: a diversification strategy that made sense in the 1990s has underperformed in an era dominated by concentrated technology bets.

The SpaceX IPO represents a genuine inflection point. If Kingdom Holding recycles those gains into more of the same — broad, blue-chip Western equity positions — analysts expect the discount to persist. But if the company uses the moment to pivot toward higher-growth sectors like AI infrastructure, clean energy, or Saudi Vision 2030-aligned plays, the current share price weakness could eventually look like a floor rather than a ceiling. Alwaleed's personal fortune is meanwhile at a decade high thanks to SpaceX, even as his conglomerate's shareholders wait for their version of the story to pay off.