Prince Al Waleed bin Talal Al Saud, a member of the Saudi royal household, has bought a 5% stake in Lucid Motors, growing the Kingdom’s total possession of the electrical car firm.
A brand new filing with the U.S. Securities and Trade Fee printed Tuesday exhibits that the billionaire prince lately bought just a little greater than 19 million shares. In a post on X, he wrote that his funding workplace made the acquisition when Lucid’s market cap was beneath $2 billion.
That occurred on July 14, when an electrical car weblog printed a report claiming that Lucid was contemplating both submitting for chapter safety or being taken non-public by Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund. Lucid strenuously denied the reports, and the corporate’s inventory worth has since rebounded.
“We don’t touch upon particular person investments, however we’re conscious and respect the impartial vote of confidence,” Lucid Motors’ chief communications officer Nick Twork stated in a press release to TechCrunch.
The share buy comes in the course of a serious restructuring effort kicked off by Lucid’s newly appointed CEO, Silvio Napoli, who reduce 18% of the workforce in June in an effort to “simplify the company.” That adopted a similarly large layoff earlier this 12 months earlier than Napoli took over.
Lucid Motors has been majority-owned by the wealth fund — often called the Public Funding Fund, or PIF — since its preliminary funding in 2018. That funding got here after Saudi Arabia thought-about, however in the end deserted, plans to take Tesla non-public. The PIF has owned roughly 60% of Lucid Motors for the reason that EV maker merged with a particular objective acquisition firm in 2021, a transaction that introduced it to public markets and raised $4 billion.
The Saudis have remained a serious supply of monetary assist for Lucid Motors because it went public, shopping for up shares and lending billions of {dollars} as the corporate has struggled to succeed in a mass market of EV patrons within the U.S. and overseas.
Prince Al Waleed bin Talal has a historical past of investing in U.S. tech. By his holding firm, he was a serious shareholder of Twitter when it was nonetheless public. In 2022, he initially balked at Elon Musk’s attempt to purchase the social media firm. However he rapidly reversed course and cozied up to Musk and have become the second-largest shareholder of Twitter after Musk took it non-public. (It’s unclear whether or not he has retained that stake by means of the corporate’s evolution into X and its subsequent merger with xAI, and now into SpaceX.)
He additionally owns stakes in Snap and Deezer and is sometimes called the “Arabian Warren Buffett,” in keeping with his website.
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