About a decade in the past, a flashy, deep-pocketed investor made an look. Saudi Arabia’s Public Funding Fund (PIF) had a mandate to go large, and was able to: it picked up a $3.5bn stake in Uber, positioned $45bn on the planet’s largest technology-investment fund, SoftBank’s Imaginative and prescient Fund, and offered half the capital for a $40bn infrastructure fund run by Blackstone, a private-equity big. It has since purchased stakes in the whole lot from Heathrow Airport and Nintendo to Hollywood studios and French lodges. Final yr it deployed greater than $30bn of recent capital, making it the highest-spending wealth fund on the planet (see chart).
