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Mohammed Al-Amoudi is worth $9.12 billion according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. He is the largest individual outside investor in Ethiopia, the owner of Sweden's biggest oil refinery until he recently sold it, and the man Bloomberg consistently ranks among the 300 wealthiest people alive. And yet he is nowhere to be found on the Forbes 2026 World's Billionaires List.
Prince Alwaleed bin Talal is there, sitting at $20 billion and listed among the wealthiest Saudis on the planet. Fifteen Saudi citizens appeared on the Forbes 2025 list for the first time since 2018, and the Kingdom maintained its presence on the Forbes 2026 list released Tuesday, with Prince Alwaleed listed at $20 billion. Al-Amoudi, 79, holds dual citizenship, born in Ethiopia to an Ethiopian mother and a Yemeni father before emigrating to Saudi Arabia and taking Saudi citizenship. His ties to Ethiopia are not those of a foreign investor but of a son of the soil who left and returned with capital. He built his empire in Saudi Arabia and invested across three continents. He is not on the Forbes list.
The gap between Bloomberg and Forbes is not unusual in general terms. The two platforms use different methodologies, different valuation approaches and different thresholds for inclusion. What makes Al-Amoudi's case unusual is the size of the gap and the specific history behind it.
The 2017 arrest and what it did to his listing
In November 2017, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman launched a sweeping anti-corruption crackdown that swept up hundreds of princes, businessmen and officials. Most were held at the Ritz-Carlton hotel in Riyadh. Al-Amoudi was among them. He spent 14 months in detention before being released in January 2019, with no official explanation ever given by Saudi authorities for either the arrest or the release.
The detention had an immediate effect on his Forbes status. In 2018, Forbes removed all Saudi billionaires from its annual ranking, citing the lack of transparency around their wealth following the purge. The magazine said at the time that "with greater clarity regarding their wealth, some might eventually return to the ranking."
Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, who was also detained in the same crackdown and released in January 2018 after roughly 83 days, made his return to Forbes in 2025. He had been off the list since 2017. His comeback was part of a broader Saudi reinstatement: 15 Saudi billionaires appeared on the Forbes 2025 list, 14 of them newcomers who built their wealth through stakes in companies listed on the Saudi stock exchange. Alwaleed was the only returnee from the pre-2018 era.
Al-Amoudi was not reinstated. He did not appear on Forbes 2025 and does not appear on Forbes 2026. He has now been absent from the list for eight consecutive years.
Why Forbes has not brought him back
Forbes has not publicly explained the specific reasoning behind Al-Amoudi's continued exclusion. But the explanation lies in how Forbes approaches verification, and why Bloomberg's method produces a different result.
Forbes relies on documented, verifiable assets. Its editors seek confirmation from wealth holders, their representatives or auditable public records. They apply conservative estimates and require enough clarity around an individual's holdings to be confident in the number they publish.
Bloomberg takes a different approach. Its Billionaires Index is a daily, market-driven calculation. Bloomberg analysts model each fortune based on publicly available information, market valuations and their own estimates of private assets. The methodology is transparent but does not require the subject's participation or confirmation. Bloomberg has detailed Al-Amoudi's fortune on its profile page, breaking it down asset by asset: his stake in Preem, his interest in Granitor, his holdings through Midroc Europe, his Ethiopian assets including MIDROC Gold and Okote Gold, and his Saudi-based Naft Services gas station business.
The critical difference is that Al-Amoudi's empire is almost entirely privately held. He has no major publicly listed company. There is no share price to anchor a valuation. Forbes, which leans heavily on verifiable public market data and direct confirmation, struggles to independently validate a fortune built almost entirely through private companies spread across three countries. Bloomberg, working from its own models, has fewer constraints on what it can estimate.
There is also the matter of Al-Amoudi's media presence, or lack of it. He rarely grants interviews, does not maintain a public communications office that engages with the press, and has no history of proactively cooperating with wealth ranking exercises. Alwaleed bin Talal, by contrast, spent years cultivating his Forbes relationship, sometimes aggressively. He had Kingdom Holding's chief financial officer fly to New York to negotiate valuation figures before list deadlines. Forbes editors have written about the intensity of those exchanges. That kind of active engagement matters when the methodology depends on confirmation.
What has happened to his fortune in recent years
Al-Amoudi's wealth has been through significant turbulence since his 2019 release from detention. At his peak he was worth more than $12 billion. Then came the events that reshaped the picture.
His most consequential move was the sale of Preem, Sweden's largest oil refinery and the cornerstone of his European portfolio. Switzerland-based VARO Energy agreed to acquire Corral Petroleum Holdings, the parent company of Preem, in a deal that closed in 2025. Al-Amoudi's stake in Preem had been valued at roughly $5.09 billion at the time of the announcement. Preem itself had been struggling, with revenue dropping 5.04% in 2024 to SEK130.77 billion ($12.77 billion) and net profit falling 83% to SEK995 million ($97.24 million) as refining margins weakened and financial costs rose.
The sale initially caused his Bloomberg valuation to fall sharply. In early 2025, Bloomberg also cut its estimate of his wealth after he sold Svenska Petroleum Exploration and revised down the valuation of his gold assets, wiping roughly $4 billion off his Bloomberg total in a short period. He briefly dropped off Bloomberg's top 500 list entirely when his net worth slipped below the $6.45 billion threshold. He has since recovered, with Bloomberg currently placing his net worth at approximately $9.12 billion.
His remaining assets tell a story of a man reorganizing a sprawling empire. In Ethiopia, he controls MIDROC Investment Group, the conglomerate he built from the mid-1980s onward, which spans gold mining through MIDROC Gold and Okote Gold, agriculture, construction, hospitality, oil distribution through National Oil Ethiopia, and manufacturing. MIDROC Gold is Ethiopia's sole gold exporter, with its Lega Dembi mine producing roughly 4,500 kilograms of gold and silver annually. He also owns Trans Nation Airways, a domestic and charter airline based in Addis Ababa.
In Sweden, even after the Preem sale, he retains a minority stake in Granitor, a property and infrastructure group operating across the Nordic region, and still controls Midroc Europe, a construction and property business with divisions in services, property and consulting. In Saudi Arabia, he holds Naft Services, a gas station operator, and maintains construction and real estate interests built on the government contracts that originally made him wealthy.
Morocco was the site of a significant setback. Al-Amoudi had long pursued a $2.7 billion compensation claim through international arbitration over SAMIR, Morocco's sole oil refinery that he once owned and which collapsed under heavy debt. In 2024, the International Center for Settlement of Investment Disputes in Washington dismissed the claim. That ruling closed off what had been a live possibility of a major windfall.
The question that remains
Al-Amoudi's continued absence from Forbes, despite his reappearance and growth on Bloomberg, is really a story about verification and visibility. Forbes brought back Alwaleed because Kingdom Holding is publicly listed on the Saudi Exchange, because Alwaleed has always made his finances accessible, and because there is now enough publicly documented information about post-2017 Saudi wealth to satisfy the magazine's standard of confidence.
Al-Amoudi presents a harder case. His assets are private, spread across multiple jurisdictions, valued in different currencies, and often difficult to independently confirm. The sale of Preem removed his most legible asset, the one that Bloomberg and others could value using comparable public company multiples. What remains is a deep but opaque portfolio.
Bloomberg is willing to publish an estimate and explain its model. Forbes is not willing to publish a number it cannot defend. Until Al-Amoudi's remaining assets become more transparent, or until he takes a step toward public disclosure, the gap between the two rankings will persist. His $9 billion exists on Bloomberg. On Forbes, it remains invisible.
