- 2 months ago
Qatar is widely recognized as one of the wealthiest nations in the world, and much of that global attention naturally extends to the country’s ruling Al Thani family. Their wealth is often discussed in headlines, online estimates, and speculative reports, yet the actual scale of Qatar’s royal fortune is more complex than a single number. The family’s wealth is tied to state power, sovereign assets, private holdings, energy revenues, and elite access to some of the most valuable sectors in the global economy. For readers interested in royal wealth, Gulf monarchies, or the economics of oil and gas, the question is not simply whether the Qatar royal family is rich, but how that wealth is structured and sustained over time.
Category
🛠️
LifestyleTranscript
00:00Everyone knows that the Qatari family is rich, but just how rich are they?
00:03From iconic skyscrapers to luxury superyachts, their lifestyle is fascinating.
00:07But calculating the true extent of Qatar's royal fortune
00:10is far more complex than simple net worth figures.
00:13Let's break it all down.
00:15The Sea of Wealth
00:16When a family's personal ledger seamlessly overlaps with the balance sheet of an entire
00:20sovereign nation, traditional metrics of wealth completely break down.
00:23The House of Thani doesn't simply hold accounts.
00:25They helm a financial enterprise where state energy revenues, private holdings,
00:28and public investment arms weave together into a single, elusive network.
00:32Standard lists rank them among the world's richest dynasties,
00:35but those figures only capture what they choose to make visible.
00:38Walk through any major financial capital,
00:40and you are likely standing in the footprint of their portfolio.
00:43Over decades, their strategy has shifted from passive holding to acquiring strategic stakes
00:47in iconic global landmarks, luxury brands, and key infrastructure.
00:50Yet behind the public profile of prime real estate and hypervisible trophy assets lies a vast,
00:55multi-layered maze of private entities and holding companies designed specifically to keep the full
01:00scale of their influence obscured.
01:02And here is the strange part.
01:03While headline estimates frequently toss around figures like $350 billion,
01:08nobody, not a journalist, not an analyst, not an auditor,
01:11not a single person standing outside a very small circle of rooms in Doha can actually prove it.
01:16That is not an insult aimed at the reporters who print it.
01:19It is a description of how this particular fortune is built.
01:21Because the Al Thani fortune is not a bank balance.
01:24It is not a portfolio you can pull up on a screen and scroll through.
01:27It is a fusion of a family, a government, a sovereign wealth fund, and a gas field,
01:31layered on top of each other so tightly that pulling one apart from the other stops being
01:35accounting and starts being archaeology.
01:37So we are going to take it apart, piece by piece.
01:39And by the end of this video, you will understand not just how much the Al Thani family has,
01:43but the far more interesting question underneath it, how a family of pearl traders from a sandbar
01:47in the Persian Gulf ended up owning pieces of London, Paris, Manhattan, and Wall Street.
01:52Let's start with the number that gets cited the most.
01:55The $335 billion figure is not a fantasy.
01:58It has a paper trail.
01:59It is widely cited across media and reflects a mix of direct family holdings,
02:03influence over state resources, and extensive global investments.
02:06Trace it backwards far enough and you arrive at a 2017 Bloomberg report that mapped out what it
02:11described as Qatar's $335 billion global empire, assembled through the country's sovereign wealth
02:17fund.
02:17Read that sentence again slowly, because the important word is hiding in plain sight,
02:22sovereign.
02:22That figure was never a measurement of what the Al Thani family privately owns.
02:26It was a measurement of what the state of Qatar controls.
02:29And the reason the two got welded together in the public imagination is that in Qatar,
02:33the distinction between the two is genuinely blurry, a product of the family's control over
02:37an absolute monarchy and the sovereign assets attached to it.
02:40So the honest version of the answer is not one number.
02:43It is three numbers, stacked, and you need all three to see the shape of the thing.
02:47The first number is the Qatar Investment Authority.
02:50The QIA was founded in 2005 to manage the bulk of the country's oil and natural gas surpluses,
02:55which is a very dry way of saying it was built to solve a very specific problem.
02:59Qatar was making more money from gas than it could physically spend.
03:02That is not a metaphor.
03:03In a country with a small citizen population and a colossal energy income, the surplus becomes
03:08a logistics problem.
03:09You have to put it somewhere.
03:10The QIA is where it went.
03:12Today, as of 2026, that fund's assets under management are estimated at somewhere around
03:17$580 to $600 billion, a scale confirmed by Blumerg reporting in January 2026 on the
03:24roughly $580 billion wealth fund weighing a radical overhaul of how it operates.
03:29And who sits at the top of it, the emir, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad al-Sani, heads or influences
03:34the QIA.
03:35That is the first layer, $600 billion of sovereign capital, steered by a man whose surname is
03:41also the name of the ruling house.
03:42The second number is the one that almost never makes the headline, and it is arguably the
03:47more revealing of the two.
03:48Separate from the sovereign pile, some reports note private family holdings potentially exceeding
03:53$150 billion, $150 billion, held privately, sitting alongside the state fund rather than
04:00inside it.
04:00And then there is the third number, which is the smallest and the strangest of all, the
04:04personal net worth of the emir himself.
04:06Here the estimates do not merely disagree, they collapse.
04:09Individual estimates for the emir range from roughly $1.2 billion all the way up to $10 billion,
04:14with figures in the $2-3 billion range cited more commonly.
04:18Sit with that for a second.
04:19We are talking about a man positioned at the top of a $600 billion sovereign fund, and the
04:23public estimates of his personal wealth swing by a factor of 8.
04:27That gap is not sloppiness.
04:28That gap is the story.
04:30When there is no requirement to disclose, there is nothing to check the guess against.
04:33And this is before we account for scale of another kind.
04:36The family has roughly 8,000 members, though core Al-Thani figures hold the primary power
04:40and the primary benefits.
04:428,000 people.
04:43Not 8,000 billionaires, but 8,000 people connected by blood to a system, with a very large tap,
04:48and a very short list of hands allowed near the valve.
04:51Numbers on a page are abstract, so let's do something better, let's take a walk.
04:55Start in London, because London is where this becomes impossible to ignore.
04:59Qatari capital has poured into the British capital so heavily that parts of the city picked
05:03up a nickname, one of the most cited being, Little Doha.
05:06Look up at the tallest building in Western Europe.
05:08Qatari investors own 95% of the Shard.
05:11Walk into Knightsbridge and step through the doors of Harrods, acquired for around 1.5 billion
05:15pounds.
05:16Head east to Canary Wharf where there are stakes.
05:18Wander through Mayfair where there are properties.
05:20Go out to Stratford and look at the Olympic Village, which is also on the list.
05:23Fly out of Heathrow and you are passing through an airport in which there is a stake.
05:26Then here is the line that tends to stop people cold.
05:29The Qatari position in prime London real estate is reported to surpass the British royal family's
05:34own holdings in that space.
05:36A family from a peninsula smaller than Yorkshire owns more of central London than the family
05:41that has ruled Britain for centuries.
05:43And London is one city.
05:44The portfolio also runs through extensive Manhattan, European and Asian properties.
05:49Now leave the real estate and look at the share registers, because this is where the reach
05:53gets quieter and considerably deeper.
05:54The Qatari position includes significant stakes in Barclays, Volkswagen and Porsche, Sainsbury's,
06:00Credit Suisse historically, Glancourt and others.
06:02A British bank, a German carmaker, a British supermarket chain, a Swiss financial institution,
06:08a global commodities trader.
06:09Then sport and media, which is where the wealth becomes something people actually feel.
06:13Paris Saint-Germain, one of the most recognizable football clubs on the planet, is controlled
06:18through Qatar sports investments.
06:20There is a position in the film studio Muramax.
06:22And then there is the single most visible expenditure in modern sporting history.
06:26World Cup infrastructure spending, reported at around $200 billion and above.
06:31$200 billion for a tournament that lasted 29 days.
06:35Beyond that sit luxury hotels through Qatari hospitality, technology investments, and diversification
06:41into renewables and artificial intelligence.
06:44And finally, the part everyone actually clicks for, the spending.
06:47There is the Royal Palace Complex in Doha, a gold adorned compound valued at roughly $1 billion.
06:52There is the Megayacht Qatari, carrying a price tag in the region of $400 million.
06:57There are private jets, supercars and exclusive properties.
07:00And there is the art, including works by Warhol and Saison.
07:03So we have our answer right.
07:04Palaces, yachts, Harrods, a football club, half of London.
07:08Number not even close.
07:09Because everything I have just listed is the receipt.
07:12It is the paper trail left behind by the transaction.
07:14It tells you what was bought.
07:15It tells you nothing about the machine doing the buying.
07:18And that machine, the actual engine of this fortune, is not made of gas or property or
07:22shares at all.
07:23It is made of something far simpler and far harder to copy.
07:27The machine that makes the money.
07:29Here is the thing about almost every enormous fortune you have ever heard of.
07:32There is usually a product at the center of it.
07:34Software.
07:35Cars.
07:35Oil.
07:36Retail.
07:36Something you can point at.
07:37The Al Thani fortune has a product, yes.
07:40But the product is not the engine.
07:41The engine is control.
07:43The Al Thani family's tight political control in Qatar's absolute monarchy directly enables
07:48the mechanisms for wealth accumulation.
07:50Blending state resources with family benefits in a classic Rontier state model.
07:54That single sentence is worth more than the entire asset list from part one.
07:58So let's translate it out of academic language.
08:01In most countries if you want to change how the national budget is allocated, you need
08:04votes, coalitions, committees and years.
08:06In Qatar, power is concentrated in the Amir and key Al Thani family members, with the Amir
08:11appointing the cabinet, the prime minister and key officials, while the family holds critical
08:15portfolios including foreign affairs, interior and commerce.
08:19That is the machine.
08:20Everything else is output.
08:22Start at the source.
08:22Qatar is an energy giant, and as rulers, the family directs the country's vast LNG and
08:27oil income.
08:28Those surpluses flow into national coffers the family oversees, funding lavish royal lifestyles,
08:33palaces and private holdings, while simultaneously supporting public welfare in a way that maintains
08:38legitimacy.
08:39That second half matters enormously, and it is the part that gets missed.
08:43This is not extraction with nothing given back.
08:45Family oversight of the LNG-driven economy and the QIA ensures surpluses fund a high-standard
08:50welfare state, no income tax, subsidies, education and health care.
08:54Think about the elegance of that arrangement for a moment.
08:56The citizens of Qatar get one of the highest standards of living on earth and pay no income
09:01tax.
09:01In exchange, the question of who controls the revenue simply never becomes an urgent public
09:05argument.
09:06And on top of that, no personal income taxes plus generous stipends and subsidies for family
09:11members amplify the effect.
09:13Prosperity purchases stability.
09:15Stability protects the machine.
09:16The machine generates prosperity.
09:18The loop closes.
09:19Layer 2 is where the surplus becomes permanent.
09:22The emir and senior al-Thani influence the QIA's roughly $580 to $600 billion in assets
09:28under management.
09:29While the fund is state-owned, decision-making links closely to the ruler and the prime minister,
09:33enabling investments that yield returns benefiting family networks, real estate empires, stakes
09:38in global firms.
09:40And running alongside it, private holdings estimated at $150 billion and up, separate from full sovereign
09:46assets.
09:47This is the conversion step.
09:48Gas is finite.
09:49Buildings, banks, and football clubs are not.
09:51Every dollar moved from the ground into the fund is a dollar converted from a wasting asset
09:56into a compounding one.
09:57And those acquisitions do more than appreciate.
09:59Purchases like Harrods, The Shard, PSG in US and European properties generate ongoing income,
10:05prestige deals, and potential side benefits for connected entities.
10:09Prestige, note that word.
10:10It is doing real work in that sentence, and we will come back to it.
10:13Layer 3 is the one that never appears in a valuation.
10:17Family members hold key economic portfolios, energy, investment, commerce, facilitating contracts,
10:23partnerships, and commissions.
10:24Historical pearling dominance evolved into modern control over tenders, boards, and subsidiaries,
10:29including Katari Dyer and Katar Sports Investments, creating layers of family-linked businesses and
10:34opportunities.
10:35Read that as a flowchart rather than a paragraph.
10:37The family appoints the ministers.
10:39The ministries award the contracts.
10:40The contracts flow to subsidiaries.
10:42The subsidiaries are chaired by the family.
10:44This pattern of Katari power expanding outward through corporate structures has been described
10:49as a family on a quest to conquer the world.
10:51There is no leak in that pipe because there is no point along it where the pipe leaves the
10:55family.
10:56Now the layer that makes all the others possible, and the reason we opened this video by admitting
11:00nobody, can verify the headline number.
11:03Non-transparent governance, no strong independent judiciary, no public disclosure,
11:07of royal finances, minimizes accountability.
11:10The blurring of state and family lines allows the allocation of revenues, land grants, and
11:14assets to relatives, while succession and inner circle control perpetuate the cycle.
11:19This is why estimates of the Amir's personal wealth vary by a factor of eight.
11:23Not because analysts are lazy, but because there is no ledger to open.
11:26Even the fund's own public presence is limited.
11:29The QIA's official site offers only limited disclosures.
11:32You cannot audit what was never published, and you cannot challenge what you cannot audit.
11:36And now the cleverest layer of all, because this is the one that separates Qatar from every
11:41other resource-rich state on earth.
11:43Qatar turned diplomacy into an asset class.
11:46Mediation roles, Israel Hamas, the Taliban and others, and hosting the World Cup attract
11:51investments, alliances and favorable deals.
11:53That influence secures market access, protects assets, and opens doors for QIA expansion, including
11:59pledges of $500 billion in the United States.
12:02Soft power via Al Jazeera and sport enhances brand value and deal flow.
12:06Qatar has built an entire foreign policy around being the room where the talking happens.
12:10The country positions itself as a neutral broker, hosting talks in offices, including for the
12:15Taliban and Hamas, with key roles in Israel-Hamas negotiations, U.S. Taliban talks, Ukraine-Russia
12:20prisoner swaps, Iran-related deals, and files in Darfur, Lebanon, and Yemen.
12:25Diplomatic sources have described Qatar's commitment to an honest mediator role in those negotiations,
12:30and researchers have examined at length the motivations, acceptance, and modalities that make
12:35Qatari mediation work.
12:36The strategic logic is ruthless in its simplicity.
12:39A country of Qatar's size cannot defend itself through force, so it makes itself structurally
12:43necessary instead.
12:44If the world's most difficult conversations happen in your hotels, nobody can afford for
12:48you to disappear.
12:49This enhances leverage despite size, balancing ties with the United States, home to the Al-Yudade
12:54base, alongside Iran, Israel, and others.
12:57Then add the amplifier.
12:58Al-Jazeera, launched in 1996, provided independent Arab world coverage that amplified Qatar's voice,
13:05and sometimes strained relations, notably with Saudi Arabia and Egypt, and is widely seen
13:09as a foreign policy tool.
13:11Add Sport, hosting the 2022 FIFA World Cup, acquiring PSG through Qatar Sports Investments,
13:16plus Formula One, tennis and other events, building soft power and global visibility, a strategy
13:21examined in academic work on sport as an instrument of Qatari influence.
13:25Add Education.
13:26University campuses including Cornell, Georgetown, and Northwestern operating in Qatar.
13:31Taken together, analysts describe a deliberate soft power strategy designed to shape Qatar's
13:36international profile, one that has made a nation of this size a genuinely pivotal, small
13:40state, actor in energy, diplomacy, and culture.
13:43None of this has been frictionless, and it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise.
13:47Qatar's influence draws scrutiny over human rights, labor issues connected to the World
13:52Cup, alleged militant funding which Qatar denies, and accusations of bias at Al Jazeera.
13:57The 2017-2021 blockade by Saudi Arabia and the UAE exposed the country's vulnerabilities,
14:03but also reinforced its resilience.
14:05That blockade was the closest thing to a live stress test this system has ever faced.
14:09Neighbors cut the country off.
14:10Qatar did not fold.
14:11And the domestic picture held, with intrafamily dynamics stabilized over decades through the
14:16distribution of roles and wealth, minimizing dissent, supported by control over media,
14:20education through the Qatar Foundation, and security.
14:23The long-term risks are real.
14:24Overliance on energy, geopolitical backlash, and diversification needs could all challenge
14:29the model.
14:29But control provides the tools to adapt, through bets on AI and technology, and continued mediation
14:34leverage.
14:35Overall, political monopoly translates into self-reinforcing wealth generation, far beyond
14:40typical monarchies.
14:41So that is the machine, revenue, fund, network, opacity, diplomacy, five layers, turning gas
14:46into permanent global wealth.
14:48But a machine has to be built.
14:49Somebody had to design it.
14:51And 150 years ago, the men who would design it were not running a sovereign wealth fund.
14:56They were diving for pearls.
14:58From PEARLS to 300 billion.
15:01To understand how the richest dynasty of the modern Gulf began, you have to delete almost
15:05everything currently in your head about Qatar.
15:08No skyline, no airline, no stadiums, no gas, just a low, hot, sun-hammered peninsula sticking
15:14out into the Gulf, with very little fresh water, and almost nothing anyone would want
15:17to invade it for.
15:18The House of Al-Thani traces its origins to the Banu-Tamam tribe of Central Arabia, of
15:23Adnanite lineage, migrating to Qatar in the 18th century, and rising to rule through tribal
15:28alliances, the pearling trade and strategic diplomacy in the 19th.
15:32More precisely, the ancestors moved from Najd, the Ushager and Jabron Oasis region, to southern
15:37Qatar around the 1720s, settling in areas such as Sikak, Zubara, Al-Ruwais and Fuwurit
15:42before Doha, as part of the Madhid branch.
15:44They were migrants.
15:45They arrived with nothing structural, no throne, no treasury, no claim.
15:49The family takes its name from Thani bin Mohammed, whose son Mohammed bin Thani became a prominent
15:54pearl and date trader, and a prayer leader in Doha by the 1840s and 1850s.
15:59Hold that image because it is the seat of everything, a trader, and a prayer leader.
16:03Commerce in one hand, moral authority in the other.
16:06That combination is not an accident.
16:08It is the prototype of every move the family would make for the next two centuries.
16:12In the mid-1800s, the Gulf was a chessboard being played by people far larger than Qatar,
16:17the Bahrainis, the Saudis, the Ottoman Empire, and offshore the British, who wanted the shipping
16:22lanes calm.
16:22Mohammed bin Thani, ruling from around 1850 to 1876, consolidated leadership in Doha amid
16:30these power vacuums, playing Bahraini, Saudi, and Ottoman influences against each other.
16:34The rise of the Al Thani family in Doha and Bitta through this period, and the conflicts
16:38with Bahrain that shaped it, are documented in detail in the historical record of the city.
16:43Then came the moment that changed the family's legal status forever.
16:46British recognition helped legitimize the Al Thani as Qatar's representatives for treaties,
16:51including the 1868 agreement of curbing piracy.
16:55That is the hinge.
16:56In 1868, a global superpower needed somebody in Qatar to sign a document, and the family
17:02that was chosen stopped being one prominent trading family among several, and started being
17:06the address of the country.
17:07Next came the man history remembers best.
17:10Mohammed's son Jassim bin Mohammed, ruling from 1878 to 1913, and known as the founder of
17:16modern Qatar, defended the peninsula against Ottoman and Bahraini incursions and expanded
17:21the family's influence.
17:22And underneath the politics ran the money.
17:24The purling industry was central.
17:26The family owned boats and dominated the trade, generating wealth without heavy taxation, which
17:31in turn bolstered loyalty.
17:33Stop there because this is the single most important sentence in the entire history of
17:37this family.
17:38Wealth without heavy taxation, which bolstered loyalty.
17:42That is the exact formula running Qatar today.
17:44In the 1800s, the resource was oysters and the mechanism was fleet ownership.
17:48Today the resource is gas and the mechanism is a sovereign wealth fund.
17:51The technology changed completely.
17:53The underlying deal did not change at all.
17:55Prosperity flows down, and in return, authority is not questioned.
17:58That doctrine is 150 years old, and it was invented on a fishing boat.
18:02Then came the 20th century, which very nearly ended the whole story.
18:06Abdullah bin Jassim, ruling from 1913 to 1949, navigated the Ottoman withdrawal and the British
18:12treaties, including the 1916 treaty with Britain that placed Qatar under British protection.
18:17But the real crisis of his reign was economic.
18:19Cultured pearls arrived on the world market and the natural pearl trade, the entire basis
18:23of Qatari wealth, collapsed.
18:25The lifeboat arrived just in time.
18:27Oil was discovered in the 1930s and exported after the Second World War, introducing new revenues.
18:33The peninsula had been handed a second resource, and this one was worth immeasurably more than
18:38the first.
18:38Decades later, Khalifa bin Hamid, ruling from 1972 to 1995, oversaw early oil and gas development
18:45and laid the foundations of the welfare state, while the family unified the tribes and centralized
18:49power.
18:50That centralization is the quiet, unglamorous work that everything afterwards depended on.
18:54Qatar's national history through this period is documented by the state itself.
18:58And then 1995, the year the modern era begins.
19:02Hamid bin Khalifa, ruling from 1995 to 2013, orchestrated a coup against his own father in
19:081995, and then proceeded to rebuild the country from the foundations up.
19:12What followed was one of the fastest national transformations in modern economic history.
19:17Hamid built out massive LNG infrastructure that generated enormous surpluses, founded the
19:22QIA in 2005 for diversification, launched Al Jazeera in 1996, and pursued sports and media
19:28diplomacy.
19:29Under his leadership, Qatar pursued an aggressive strategy of internationalization, and analysts
19:33continue to assess the legacy of that reign as the decisive turning point in Qatar's rise.
19:38Look at what he actually did there because the sequencing is the genius of it.
19:42Build the gas capacity, capture the surplus, institutionalize the surplus in a fund so
19:46it survives him.
19:47Buy a global voice, buy global visibility, four moves, and every single one is still generating
19:52returns today.
19:53In 2013, Hamid did something almost unheard of among Gulf rulers.
19:57He voluntarily handed power to his son while still alive.
20:01Tamim bin Hamid, ruling from 2013 to the present, continued diversification under Qatar National
20:06Vision 2030, navigated the Gulf crisis from 2017 to 2021, hosted the 2022 World Cup, and expanded
20:13global investments, with the QIA growing to roughly $580 to $600 billion in assets under
20:19management.
20:20His approach has been more pragmatic and lower-profile than his father's, particularly after the Gulf
20:25crisis, while maintaining independence and strong U.S. security ties alongside regional
20:30balancing, an evolution tracked closely by regional policy researchers.
20:34So, compress three centuries into four steps, and the whole thing becomes almost embarrassingly
20:38clear.
20:39Step 1.
20:40The Perling Era.
20:41Pre-oil dominance in a lucrative trade provided the initial capital and the political leverage.
20:46Step 2.
20:46The oil and gas boom.
20:47Discoveries from the 1930s to the 1970s and the LNG focus from the 1990s onward turned modest revenues
20:54into billions, while family control insured surpluses funded the QIA and private assets.
20:59Step 3.
21:00Strategic Investment and Globalization.
21:02The QIA's global portfolio in real estate, banking, and sport compounded the wealth, while
21:07diplomacy and soft power secured the deals and the influence.
21:10Step 4.
21:11Political Monopoly.
21:12Absolute rule allowed revenue allocation, land grants, and business favoritism, sustaining
21:17dynastic enrichment across roughly 8,000 members.
21:20Capital Resource.
21:21Compounding Control.
21:22Four Steps, Three Centuries, One Family.
21:25Which brings us back to where we started, and to the answer, we can now finally give honestly.
21:29The headline says $335 billion, a figure circulating from around 2017 onward that blends sovereign
21:36scale with family control, and remains a common benchmark.
21:39It appears in ranking after ranking of the world's richest royal families, but the same
21:43reporting concedes the crucial caveat.
21:45Conventional rich lists underrepresent this fortune because of its opacity, and the wealth
21:49keeps growing with energy revenues, investments, and markets.
21:52So the truthful answer sounds like this.
21:54Their personal fortunes are real but comparatively modest, in the low billions for the emir himself.
21:59Their private family holdings are enormous, plausibly north of $150 billion, and the pool
22:04they direct is close to $600 billion, money that is technically the state's, and practically
22:09theirs to point.
22:10Asking how rich the Al Thani family is turns out to be the wrong question, because it assumes
22:14a boundary that does not exist.
22:16This system has elevated the family's estimated $335 billion collective wealth, making them
22:21one of the richest dynasties on earth, while simultaneously funding Qatar's global rise.
22:26The fortune and the country are the same object viewed from two angles.
22:29From tribal traders to one of the world's richest families, the Al Thani leveraged geography,
22:34resources, and astute alliances, and masterfully converted wealth into disproportionate global
22:39clout.
22:39The real question is not how much they have.
22:41It is what happens when the gas eventually stops, and whether a fund, a football club,
22:46a news network, and half of Mayfair are enough to outlive the thing that paid for them.
22:50Because the family that solved that exact problem once before, when the pearl market
22:54collapsed a century ago, is betting that they can solve it again.