Washington: Saudi Arabia’s deputy crown prince met Facebook Inc. Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg during a tour of Silicon Valley and then travelled to New York for meetings at the United Nations in a bid to de-escalate a row with the secretary-general.
In the second week of a US trip aimed at improving ties with government officials and drumming up investment, Prince Mohammad Bin Salman met Zuckerberg for the first time. Photos released by the prince’s office showed him wearing jeans and a blazer while touring the Menlo Park, California, campus with Zuckerberg and trying on an Oculus Rift virtual-reality headset.
Prince Mohammad’s stops in the San Francisco Bay Area included visits on Tuesday with Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and executives of Cisco Systems Inc. The prince signed memorandums of understanding with Microsoft and Cisco that provide for training Saudis and helping to expand the kingdom’s technology industry.
The deputy crown prince — who is also Saudi Arabia’s defence minister and the son of King Salman Bin Abdulaziz — arrived on Wednesday in New York to meet with more investors before returning to Riyadh. Back home, the prince is leading Saudi Arabia’s biggest-ever economic shake-up, moving to cut subsidies and diversify the economy away from oil by generating an extra $100 billion in non-oil revenue by 2020.
But he is also taking care of geopolitical business on his trip. Prince Mohammad spent last week in Washington, where he talked with President Barack Obama as well as Secretary of State John Kerry, Defence Secretary Ashton Carter and senior intelligence and congressional officials.
