Donald Trump spoke at a Saudi-U.S. business investment forum in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia on Tuesday, during the first official foreign trip of his second term.
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Last December, Eric Trump, Donald Trump’s son and the executive vice president of his Trump Organization, traveled to Saudi Arabia to announce the launch of a new Trump-branded project with Saudi real estate developer Dar Global: the Trump Tower Jeddah, a 47-floor luxury residential skyscraper on Saudi Arabia’s Red Sea coast that’s slated to cost $530 million to build. Addressing the crowd gathered below a crystal chandelier in a cavernous hotel ballroom, he made sure to thank Yousef Al Shelash, the chairman and cofounder of Dar Global’s parent company, Dar Al Arkan.
“He’s a man that I have such a great relationship with. We’re doing so many incredible projects all over the world,” Eric, 41, gushed of Al Shelash, who was seated at the same table. “He’s truly become a member of the Trump family and somebody I truly love dearly.”
When Al Shelash took the stage three minutes later, he returned the sentiment. “We began our relationship with the Trump Organization nearly a decade ago,” he said. “The relationship did not start as a business relationship, but rather as a friendship, and it has continued to grow.”
Among all the businessmen the Trump Organization is partnering with during Donald Trump’s second White House term—from India to Indonesia to Vietnam—Al Shelash may have paid the U.S. president more than anyone else. His firm has announced at least six Trump-branded luxury real estate deals over the past three years, in Dubai, Oman, Qatar and Saudi Arabia. It’s good money: Trump disclosed earning $7.85 million in licensing fees from a single Dar Global project in Oman between 2021 and early 2024, according to his two most recent financial disclosures. And with at least five other agreements set to begin, Trump is likely to earn millions more from licensing and management deals with Dar Al Arkan over the rest of his presidency.
Little-known outside of his home country, Al Shelash has managed to stay out of the headlines even as he’s agreed to shell out millions to partner with the most famous politician in the world. While not as rich as Trump, who has an estimated $5.5 billion fortune, Al Shelash is wealthy in his own right. Forbes estimates he’s worth $900 million, largely concentrated in shares of Dar Al Arkan, which he cofounded in 1994 alongside his brothers and five other families, and then took public on the Saudi stock exchange in 2007. He also owns 6% of SHL Finance, a publicly traded Saudi mortgage lender; 30% of Quara Finance, a Saudi consumer financing outfit that went public in 2024; and a 5.5% stake in Alkhair Holding, a Bahrain-based investment bank.
Dar Al Arkan recorded a $215 million net profit on $1 billion in revenues in 2024, up 32% and 39%, respectively, from a year earlier. A real estate developer that builds apartments, villas and residential communities, the bulk of Dar Al Arkan’s 2024 revenue—nearly 83%—came from land sales, rather than from selling finished homes or apartments. While Al Shelash doesn’t appear as a shareholder in the firm’s public filings, a person familiar with the company told Forbes that he and members of the company’s six founding families hold about 50% of the company, worth about $2.9 billion. A representative for Dar Al Arkan didn’t make Al Shelash available for an interview but confirmed Al Shelash’s net worth.
The close ties to Trump—which Al Shelash, a month after being called a member of the first family, downplayed to a Saudi state-owned TV channel as “purely a business relationship”—has already been good for Al Shelash. Shares of Dar Al Arkan have risen by 75% since the firm started rolling out more deals with the Trump Organization last July. All of those agreements have been made via Dar Global, the company’s international arm, which it established in 2017 to develop real estate outside of Saudi Arabia and then took public on the London Stock Exchange in February 2023. (Dar Al Arkan still owns 88% of Dar Global’s shares.) Stock in Dar Global has also seen a boost, jumping nearly 140% since last July despite disappointing earnings results in 2024. The firm’s two biggest stock jumps, in December and April, coincided with announcements of the Trump deals in Jeddah and Doha, respectively.
It’s no surprise, then, that Al Shelash has been playing up his closeness with the 47th president on social media. In photographs posted to Dar Al Arkan’s X and Instagram accounts, he smiled alongside Trump at a pre-inauguration event on January 19, and then appeared at the president’s “Make America Great Again Victory Rally” later the same night and at the Starlight inaugural ball the next day. Speaking with CNBC Arabia at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland the following week, he sounded an optimistic tone about Trump’s second term, saying, “We hope that this change in administration will bring stability to the region and the world.”
This article was originally published on forbes.com and all figures are in USD.
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