Kingdom Holding shares jump on billions in SpaceX value

Published: 2026-06-02T07:32:59.000Z

Saudi investors got a jolt this week. Kingdom Holding, the investment company chaired by Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, surged 10 percent to close at 13.58 riyals, its highest finish in about a decade. The trigger was its disclosure of a SpaceX stake worth billions.

Saudi investors got a jolt this week from one of the kingdom's best known names. Kingdom Holding, the investment company chaired by Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, surged 10 percent in a single session to close at 13.58 riyals, its highest finish in roughly a decade. The move capped a run of about 27 percent over three sessions, pulling the stock back to a level it had not touched since 2016. For a company whose share price spent years stuck well below its old highs, that is a notable turn. The trigger was a disclosure rather than an earnings surprise. Kingdom Holding revealed that its stake in SpaceX, combined with the holding of Prince Alwaleed's private office, adds up to about 0.63 percent of Elon Musk's rocket and satellite company. That sliver matters because of the price tag attached to it. At a roughly $1.25 trillion valuation, the position is worth in the neighborhood of $8.3 billion, and that figure climbs to around $10.5 billion if SpaceX reaches the higher $1.75 trillion mark some expect. Suddenly a stake buried inside the balance sheet looked like one of the company's most valuable assets. What gave the news extra weight is the timing. SpaceX is widely expected to pursue one of the largest public listings Wall Street has ever seen, with reporting pointing to a Nasdaq debut as soon as the middle of june. Investors tend to reprice exposure to a company well before it actually lists, and Kingdom Holding offered a relatively rare way to get a piece of that story through a publicly traded vehicle. The buying that followed reflected that scarcity as much as the underlying math. It is worth remembering how far the stock has traveled to get here. Kingdom Holding has had a bumpy decade, including a sharp drop in late 2017 when Prince Alwaleed was detained during the kingdom's anti-corruption sweep, an episode that hung over the shares for a long stretch. Seeing the company back at a ten year high says something about both its repositioned portfolio and the broader mood on the Saudi exchange. That mood is the regional thread worth pulling on. The benchmark Tadawul index opened its first session after the Eid al-Adha break with a modest gain, and appetite across the gulf for exposure to marquee American technology names has been building for years, channeled through sovereign funds like the Public Investment Fund and private vehicles alike. Saudi Arabia's Vision 2030 push to diversify away from oil has made these cross border technology bets feel less like trophies and more like strategy, and the UAE and Qatar have chased similar stakes. A single disclosure lighting up a Riyadh listed stock fits neatly into that wider story of gulf capital reaching deep into Silicon Valley.