When President-elect Donald Trump walked onto the floor at Madison Square Garden last weekend, the 20,000-person UFC crowd erupted like they had seen a knockout.

The raucous reaction wasn’t because the crowd was surprised to see Trump. After all, Donald Trump has been a UFC fan for decades. He famously allowed the UFC to host events at his hotels and casinos when no one wanted to be associated with MMA in the early 2000s, and UFC President Dana White has become such a close friend that he left his family vacation in Italy earlier this summer to fly 14 hours to Milwaukee for a 10-minute speech to introduce Trump at the Republican National Convention.

Trump has attended dozens of UFC events. But last weekend’s visit to the octagon was different from previous ones because it was his first public appearance since winning the 2024 presidential election — and he brought some friends with him.

Elon Musk. RFK Jr. Tulsi Gabbard. Vivek Ramaswamy. House Speaker Mike Johnson. Kid Rock. Depending on your political beliefs, it was like seeing Queen at Wembley Stadium in 1986 or the Falcons blowing a 28-3 lead to Tom Brady in the Super Bowl.

However, while everyone was focused on Trump’s increasingly large political entourage, no one seemed to notice that another one of the world’s most powerful men was sitting beside him. No, not Elon Musk. I’m talking about Yasir Al-Rumayyan.

Al-Rumayyan has spent the last several years ingratiating himself in the world of professional sports, leveraging Saudi Arabia’s deep pockets to curry favor with league commissioners and CEOs. From Formula 1 and UFC to WWE, professional golf, and European soccer, Yasir Al-Rumayyan has quickly gone from a relatively unknown person to someone who touches (and influences) almost every sports league worldwide.

It’s no secret that Saudi Arabia has been trying to diversify its economy through sports. The country’s state-controlled oil company, Saudi Aramco, produces over 10 million barrels of crude oil each day, reporting a *profit* of $121.3 billion last year.

That’s over $332 million in daily profits, most of which flow directly back to Saudi Arabia’s government, fueling its expenditures and providing wealth to its royal family.

Saudi Aramco now trades at a market cap of $1.8 trillion. That makes it the world’s sixth most valuable publicly traded company and the only non-US-based company within the top 15 outside of TSMC, the Taiwanese chip maker for Apple and Nvidia…