Prince Alwaleed bin Talal’s Lucid holding rose about $27.3 million in value on Tuesday, after disclosure of his 5.00% stake sent the shares up 21.5% in the heaviest trading session of the week.
Lucid closed at $7.90, a gain of $1.40 from Monday’s $6.50 — after having touched $8.50 (+30.6%) during the session.
Volume reached 39.84 million shares, 205% of the 65-day average of 19.42 million.
Applied to the 19,513,000 Class A shares reported in his Schedule 13G, the day’s move lifted the position from about $126.8 million to roughly $154.2 million.
Measured against what he invested, the gain is larger.
The Cost Basis
Alwaleed’s private office told local media outlet Asharq Business that the prince invested about $99.6 million at an average cost of $5.11 a share, and that the position was built over the preceding weeks.
At $5.11 the 19,513,000 shares cost roughly $99.7 million, consistent with the figure his office gave.
Against Tuesday’s close the holding shows an unrealised gain of about $54.4 million, or 54.6%. At the session high of $8.50 the paper profit reached roughly $66.1 million, or 66.3%.
The disclosure is the only public indication of what he paid.
A Schedule 13G reports a position and a date, never a price, and the prince had volunteered only that the stake was “acquired at a market cap of less than $2B” in a post on X.
That statement implied an entry below $5.13 a share against the 390,256,808 shares outstanding in the filing. The figure his office subsequently gave, $5.11, sits two cents beneath it.
Why the Move Was So Large
A 5.00% passive stake does not ordinarily move a stock a fifth in a day. However, short positioning does.
Short interest stood at 65.01 million shares as of July 15, against a public float of 171.9 million, or 37.8% of the tradeable stock.
The intraday range showed the imbalance. Shares opened at $6.43, fell to $6.22, then ran to $8.50, a spread of 36.7% between low and high.
The shares were trading slightly lower at $7.84 in early pre-market trading.
The Gain Is Immaterial Against His Other Position
Set beside the prince’s exposure to Elon Musk’s rocket company, the Lucid profit is a smaller gain.
Alwaleed holds 0.29% of SpaceX personally, with a further 0.34% inside Kingdom Holding Company, the vehicle he founded and chairs.
SpaceX closed Tuesday at $116.41, against its all time high of $225.64 set shortly after the IPO.
The stock has fallen 48.4% from that peak, and touched a low of $107.01 during the session.
On the company’s $1.52 trillion market capitalisation, the combined 0.63% holding is worth about $9.6 billion. At the June high the same stake was worth roughly $18.6 billion.
The implied decline is close to $9 billion, against which Tuesday’s Lucid gain represents about 0.3%. The drawdown in the SpaceX position exceeds the single-day Lucid profit by a factor of roughly 330.
Bloomberg‘s billionaires index reflects the same arithmetic, valuing the prince at $24.2 billion, up $7 billion this year but down from roughly $28 billion in June.
Who He Is
Alwaleed, 71, is a grandson of King Abdulaziz, founder of modern Saudi Arabia, through his father Prince Talal, and a grandson of Riad Al Solh, Lebanon’s first post-independence prime minister, through his mother.
He took a business degree at Menlo College in California and a master’s at Syracuse University before founding Kingdom Establishment for Commerce and Trade in 1980, the vehicle that became Kingdom Holding Company and listed on the Saudi exchange in 2007.
Kingdom Holding remains the primary vehicle.
The company carried a market capitalisation of 50.3 billion riyals, about $13.4 billion, in early June, and valued its equity investments at 60 billion riyals, roughly $16 billion, as of March 31, according to AGBI.
First-quarter net profit fell 38% year on year to 269 million riyals, or $72 million, on lower dividend income and higher hotel operating costs.
The portfolio spans financial services, hospitality, aviation, real estate, media and technology. Kingdom is the largest shareholder in Banque Saudi Fransi with 16.2%, holds a stake in the low-cost carrier Flynas, and owns the Hotel George V in Paris outright alongside interests in Four Seasons, Accor and the Savoy in London. The Citigroup position, raised to 2.2% at the end of 2023 in a $449.7 million purchase, was cut to 1.06% during 2024.
Outside Kingdom Holding he owns Saudi real estate, the Arabic media group Rotana, and an estimated 1.5% of Snap, according to Forbes.
Bloomberg‘s billionaires index values him at $24.2 billion.
Connected to PIF, but Not Through It
The stock Alwaleed profited from is controlled by Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund, which is also a shareholder in his own company.
The Public Investment Fund has backed Lucid since 2018 through Ayar Third Investment Company, investing more than $9 billion and reporting about 56.85% on a converted basis as of April, a figure that includes shares issuable on conversion of preferred stock.
Measured on common stock alone the holding is nearer 45%. Voting power is capped at 19.99% of pre-issuance voting power unless shareholders lift it.
The fund is separately a shareholder in Kingdom Holding Company, which Alwaleed founded and chairs.
PIF bought 16.87% of Kingdom from him personally in 2022 for about $1.5 billion, at the stock’s low for that year and with no premium. He retained 78.1%, with roughly 5% trading in Riyadh.
The relationship therefore runs in the opposite direction to the one the filing might suggest. Alwaleed is not part of PIF and did not buy on its behalf; the fund is a minority shareholder in his company, while separately controlling the company he has bought into.
PIF also holds around $2.7 billion of Uber, Lucid‘s other strategic investor and its robotaxi partner, placing it on both sides of that arrangement.
PIF-backed Humain invested $3 billion in xAI, a stake that converted into SpaceX shares when Musk merged the two businesses in February, leaving the fund exposed to the same drawdown as the prince.
Nothing in the filing indicates coordination. A Schedule 13G requires disclosure of group membership, and the document records none.
