00:00Saudi Arabia's wealth can be traced back to one company, Saudi Aramco. It turned a poor desert
00:04kingdom into a global energy superpower worth trillions of dollars, but it didn't happen
00:09overnight. The journey was filled with risky bets, worker unrest, and decisions that changed
00:13the country forever. Let's break it down. The well that built a kingdom
00:17The story starts in 1993, when Saudi Arabia was a young, poor kingdom with little more than sand
00:23and hope. That year, the government signed a concession agreement with Standard Oil of
00:27California, the American giant that later became Chevron. A subsidiary called the California
00:31Arabian Standard Oil Company was formed to run the hunt. For five long years, crews drilled
00:36into the desert and found almost nothing. Money burned. Doubt grew. Then in 1938, commercial
00:41oil finally burst out of Dam M Well No. 7, a hole in the ground they nicknamed the Prosperity
00:46Well. The name turned out to be an understatement. The race to pull out the treasure began at once.
00:51In 1944, the operation was renamed the Arabian American Oil Company, or Aramco, after Texaco
00:56joined, and in 1948 the companies that would become ExxonMobil bought their own stakes.
01:01Then came discoveries that changed world history. Around 1948, geologists confirmed Gawar, the
01:06largest conventional onshore oil field on the planet, which has since produced tens of billions
01:11of barrels. In 1951, crews found Safonia, the largest offshore field in the world. One country
01:17now held both records at once. Production passed 500,000 barrels per day by 1949 and blew past 1 million
01:23by 1958, while the Transarabian pipeline stretched 1,212 kilometers to rush Saudi crude toward Europe.
01:30By 1962, cumulative production hit 5 billion barrels, and by 1971, daily output averaged around
01:364.5 million barrels. But underneath the success story, something ugly was happening in the camps.
01:41Early Aramco ran a segregated system that historians have compared to Jim Crow America. American employees
01:47enjoyed a superior settlement called American Camp, while Saudi and other Arab and migrant workers were
01:51pushed into inferior camps with lower pay, worse food, worse housing, and worse medical care.
01:56The anger built until it boiled over. Strikes broke out in 1945, including at the Ra's Tenura refinery.
02:02Then in 1953, after worker representatives were arrested, roughly 13,000 of the company's 15,000
02:08Saudi workers walked off the job, demanding the release of their leaders, better allowances,
02:13less preference for foreign workers, and conditions closer to what the Americans enjoyed. The unrest was
02:17suppressed, and reforms came slowly and in limited form. The Saudi government watched all of this,
02:22and it wanted its treasure back. Pressure began in the 1950s with 50-50 profit-sharing arrangements
02:27and tax schemes nicknamed the Golden Gimmick. Then came the takeover. The state bought 25% of Aramco in
02:331973, raised its stake to 60% in 1974, and completed full ownership by 1980 through a process both sides
02:41described as amicable. In 1988, a royal decree established the Saudi Arabian oil company,
02:46Saudi Aramco, with Ali Al-Namey as its first Saudi president and chief executive. The company
02:51then grew into a fully integrated giant, even taking full ownership of the huge motiva,
02:55refining complex in the United States. The desert gamble now belonged to a single state,
03:00and it was about to reveal exactly how much money it makes.
03:03The Money Machine
03:04In December of 2019, the world finally got a peek inside the vault. Aramco listed on the
03:10Saudi exchange through the largest initial public offering in history, raising around $25.6 billion,
03:16and valuing the company near $1.7 trillion. Even that record came with a sting, because Crown Prince
03:21Mohammed bin Salman had promoted a $2 trillion target, and the market refused to pay it as
03:26international investors held back over governance, transparency, and climate worries. Little actually
03:31changed hands anyway. Today the Saudi government directly holds about 81.48%, another 16% sits with
03:38entities tied to the public investment fund, the kingdom's sovereign wealth fund, and the public
03:42free float is only around 2.5%. Ordinary investors share a sliver while the state keeps the mountain.
03:48Now for the money itself, Aramco posted a record net income of over $160 billion in 2022,
03:55a profit almost no company in history has ever touched. And even in softer years, it earned around
04:00$104.7 billion in 2025. Free cash flow still held near $85 billion in 2025, and dividends reached
04:09around $124 billion in 2024, with hundreds of billions handed out since the listing. The secret
04:16sits underground. Aramco controls around 247 billion barrels of oil equivalent in reserves,
04:22far more than the major international oil companies combined, and it pumps about 12.9 million barrels of
04:27oil equivalent per day, while keeping a maximum sustainable crude capacity of 12 million barrels
04:32per day. Spare firepower nobody else has. The empire now spans more than 50 countries and employs
04:37over 76,000 people. Then there is the cost side, where Chief Executive Amin Nasser likes to drop a number
04:44that sounds impossible. They were asking him what is the cost for extraction Saudi Aramco, and his answer
04:50was $3.3 a barrel 20 years ago. Fields age, water creeps in, and inflation eats budgets everywhere,
04:57so you would expect that number to have climbed a long way by now. Today if you ask me what
05:01is the
05:01cost for extraction, it's still $3. Nasser says it has stayed frozen in place. Those are some of
05:07the lowest lifting costs on earth, which means Aramco profits at prices that would bankrupt rivals.
05:12That engine carries the entire Saudi state. Payments from the company have often covered 50-60%
05:17or more of government revenue in peak periods, funding the modernization, infrastructure,
05:21education, and welfare that built modern Saudi Arabia. Now the cash targets the future.
05:26Under Vision 2030, the Crown Prince's plan to wean the economy off oil, Aramco dividends and share
05:31transfers feed the Public Investment Fund, which finances giga projects like NEOM plus tourism,
05:37entertainment, and sports. In 2020, Aramco also spent around $69 billion buying 70% of the
05:44chemicals giant SA-BIC, pushing deeper into petrochemicals. The company's localization
05:48program, ICTVA, has pushed local content towards 70% and added an estimated $240 billion or more to
05:55Saudi GDP. All of it stacks into a machine worth around $1.7 trillion as of early August 2026,
06:02ranking around 8th or 9th among the world's most valuable companies. And this rich makes a target
06:07this big. It has been bombed from the sky, blamed for warming the planet, and accused of running on
06:12exploited labor. The attacks, the critics, and what comes next
06:17Before dawn on the 14th of September, 2019, the machine took a direct hit. A wave of drones and
06:22missiles slammed into the Abqaiq processing facility, the largest crude oil stabilization plant in the
06:27world, and the Qurais field. In one strike, around 5.7 million barrels per day was knocked out, over
06:32half of Saudi output and about 5% of global supply, and oil prices spiked hard. Houthi forces claimed the
06:38attack, while the United States and Saudi Arabia pointed primarily at Iran. Aramco restored most
06:43of the lost production within weeks, but the world had seen how much of its oil hangs on one
06:47company's plumbing. Militants had already tried to bomb Abqaiq back in 2006, and later strikes hit
06:53other sites, including Jeddah storage and a Riyadh refinery. The second front is the climate fight.
06:58Aramco is frequently identified as the largest corporate greenhouse gas emitter in the world,
07:02and one recent ranking put its output at around 1.7 billion tons of carbon dioxide in 2024,
07:08large enough to rank high among entire countries. The Guardian has framed Saudi Arabia, with Aramco at
07:13its core, as the biggest blocker of global climate action, while earning around $170,000 a minute.
07:19Critics note its net-zero promise leaves out the massive emissions from customers actually burning
07:24its oil, and accusations of greenwashing follow its advertising and sports sponsorships.
07:29The third front echoes the 1950s camps. In 2020, a Financial Times investigation detailed
07:34whistleblower claims of bullying, racism, and corner cutting on projects like the Jisen refinery,
07:39and a viral image of a migrant worker dressed as a walking hand sanitizer dispenser drew accusations
07:45of modern slavery. More recently, the group Fair Square documented migrant workers in Aramco's
07:50contractor supply chain enduring heat above 50 degrees Celsius, slum housing, and deaths with
07:55inadequate or delayed compensation. Findings echoed in Guardian reporting on unpaid workers and
08:01fatalities. Even the money has taken bruises, because from its peak around 2022, the company's
08:06market value fell by something on the order of $800 billion. One of the larger corporate value
08:12drops on record. So is the machine running out of road?
08:24Nasser keeps insisting the world will need his product far longer than forecasters admit. Asked
08:29whether he sees a slowdown coming, his answer leaves no room for doubt. And the company is spending like
08:34it believes every word. Nasser says there is around $100 billion of construction underway, with gas
08:39production growing by more than 60% by 2030, partly because the power needed for data centers by then
08:46will be almost four times that of all electric vehicles. Aramco is even drilling for lithium,
08:51with a first processing plant targeted for 2027, has taken a stake in Humane to worry about the decline of
08:57oil. Well, I think the forecast had something to do with it, up to last year, you know. The
09:03kingdom's national artificial intelligence company, and has built its own large language model called
09:07MetaBrain, with more than 6,000 of its plant professionals trained on artificial intelligence.
09:12Push Nasser on what all this makes Aramco, and his answer flips the picture entirely.
09:16Maybe that is the final twist. The company that supplies roughly 1 in every 10 to 12
09:20barrels of oil on earth now wants to be seen as a tech firm. And analysts say its low costs
09:25could
09:25make it the last major producer standing if demand ever truly fades. 90 years ago it was a hole in
09:30the
09:30desert called the prosperity well. Today it bankrolls a kingdom, and moves world markets. Do you think
09:35Aramco can outlast the age of oil? Drop your thoughts in the comments, and we will see you in the
09:40next one.
