Money, PR and Missiles: How Saudi Spending the Past Two Years Bought Spectacle — Not Justice

For two years the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has been pouring vast sums of public and quasi-public money into a project of political marketing: reshaping its image, buying global entertainment, cultivating a Western-friendly media chorus, and nudging the politics of its neighbourhood toward normalization with Israel and away from groups Riyadh hates — notably Hezbollah. The scale is staggering. The moral scandal is worse: while billions bankroll concerts, sports leagues, PR campaigns and conditional aid to foreign factions, people in Gaza starve and towns in southern Lebanon lie in ruins.

Because Riyadh’s budgeting is opaque where politics is involved, exactly tracing every riyal that financed pro-normalization messaging or anti-Hezbollah outlets is impossible. But the documented flows and public budgets from 2023–2025 show a clear pattern: huge entertainment and PR outlays, massive sovereign-fund investments used as soft power, and conditional Gulf money dangling over Lebanon — all while the Kingdom touts humanitarianism with one hand and bankrolls political influence with the other.

Concrete money we can point to:

The Public Investment Fund (PIF), Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth vehicle, is the engine of the kingdom’s global cultural and sports push. Its 2024 reporting shows PIF with nearly $913 billion in assets under management and hundreds of billions deployed across sport, entertainment, and “gigaprojects” tied to Vision 2030. That balance sheet is being used as an influence tool.

Some headline investments are explicit soft-power bets. PIF’s backing of LIV Golf — an audacious effort to buy global sporting credentials and reshape sports narratives — alone approached $3.9 billion in capital committed and, by some accounting, may exceed $5 billion as losses and further injections mounted into 2024–2025. Those are not charity; they are public resources reshaping global media space.

On the domestic stage, Riyadh is spending at scale to create entertainment ecosystems that export a new image of the Kingdom. Riyadh Season, the multi-month entertainment festival, drew millions of visitors in 2023–24 and is explicitly budgeted and promoted in the Ministry of Finance and budget statements for 2024–2025 as a national priority — a cultural megaproject paid for with public money aimed at changing perceptions at home and abroad. Saudi budgets for 2024–25 show continued expansion of entertainment spending.

Saudi advertising and PR markets are themselves large and growing: total ad spend in 2023 is reported at roughly $2.0 billion, and the marketing/agency market is estimated at over $3 billion in 2025. A non-trivial slice of that goes to influence campaigns, both domestic and international — and historically Saudi governments and affiliated actors have spent tens of millions on foreign PR and lobbying in the US and Europe. But there is no public, line-by-line “normalization” budget. We must rely on these proximate numbers and on documented PIF investments to form the picture.

What that spending buys: normalization narratives and anti-Hezbollah messaging

Riyadh’s strategy is twofold

🫶First, to normalize ties with Israel — or at least to make normalization politically and economically palatable — through discreet diplomacy, high-level security deals, and a steady drip of media narratives in Western, Israeli and Arabic outlets arguing the pragmatic case for rapprochement. Think paid placement, friendly op-eds, think-tank reports, and coordinated lobbying that frames normalization as the path to economic modernization and security guarantees. Major Washington and Brussels lobbying pushes and private-sector outreach (sometimes supported by Saudi money) have been well documented as part of the larger normalization debate.

🫶Second, Riyadh has quietly supported — politically and financially — Lebanese actors and media that push anti-Hezbollah messaging.

🫶That is the true measure of power: not how many billboards you buy in , but how many lives you save.

— demand transparency now

This is not complaint; it’s a demand. Saudi Arabia’s use of public wealth as a marketing and political instrument must be transparent, accountable, and debated openly — especially when billions are shifted toward influence operations and theatrical spectacles while people in Gaza and Lebanon die or sleep in the rubble. If Riyadh is serious about regional stability and moral leadership, it should reveal its political spending, un-condition Gulf reconstruction offers, and redirect public money to urgent human needs before another festival lights up a trophy for “soft power.”