In 1985, Adnan Khashoggi sat in a television studio for an episode of Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous. The host asked him a simple question: “How lavish a lifestyle would you lead if you were the richest man on earth?”
Khashoggi smiled. He didn’t need to imagine. He was already living it.
Born in Mecca in 1935, Adnan Khashoggi seemed destined for privilege. His father, Muhammad Khashoggi, was King Abdul Aziz Al Saud’s personal physician, a position that placed the family inside the innermost circle of Saudi royalty. Young Adnan attended Victoria College in Alexandria, the “Eton of Egypt,” where his classmates included future kings and prime ministers.
But Adnan didn’t want to be a physician or a diplomat. He wanted to be rich. Spectacularly, impossibly, historically rich.
His first deal happened in school. A Libyan classmate’s father needed towels. An Egyptian classmate’s father manufactured towels. Adnan introduced them and walked away with $1,000 for making a phone call. He had discovered his genius: being the man in the middle.
In the 1960s, as Saudi Arabia’s oil wealth exploded and the kingdom modernized at breathtaking speed, Adnan Khashoggi positioned himself as the bridge between Western defense contractors and the Saudi royal family. He became the arms dealer who made billion-dollar weapons deals feel like gentlemen’s agreements at luxury parties.
Between 1970 and 1975 alone, Lockheed paid him $106 million in commissions. His cut started at 2.5 percent and eventually climbed to 15 percent. He didn’t just broker deals, he became the deal. Lockheed’s vice president later said, “Khashoggi became for all practical purposes a marketing arm of Lockheed.”
And with every deal, the fortune grew.
By the mid-1980s, Khashoggi’s net worth hit $4 billion, making him one of the richest people on the planet. His wealth wasn’t just money. It was spectacle.
He owned the Nabila, a 282-foot superyacht with a discotheque, movie theater, hospital and gold-plated bathroom fixtures. It was so opulent that it appeared in the James Bond film Never Say Never Again as a villain’s lair. The yacht alone cost $100 million.
He owned 12 estates across the world: Marbella, Paris, Madrid, Cannes, London, and a 180,000-acre ranch in Kenya. In Manhattan, he bought 16 apartments and knocked them together into one sprawling penthouse.
He flew on three private jets. His parties were legendary, refrigerator trucks parked outside just to chill champagne. Shirley Bassey sang “Happy Birthday” at his 50th. Guests included Sean Connery, Brooke Shields, and the future King of Jordan. He lived like a modern Croesus. And he made sure everyone knew it.
But the lifestyle came with a price and not just financially. In 1979, his wife Soraya filed for divorce. She had been Sandra Daly, a 20-year-old English model who converted to Islam when they married in 1961. For nearly two decades, she managed his homes, raised their five children and played a role in his business empire.
When the marriage ended, the divorce became one of the most expensive in history. After five brutal years of legal battles, a judge ordered Adnan to pay Soraya $874 million, equivalent to $2.8 billion today. It was the beginning of the end.
By 1990, the arms deals had dried up. Oil prices plummeted. Khashoggi’s business empire, hotels, banks, real estate even the Utah Jazz basketball team, all collapsed under debt. Legal troubles mounted as he was implicated in the Iran-Contra scandal and faced fraud charges.
According to court documents filed in 1990, the man who once had $4 billion was worth just $8 million. His main bank account held 47 cents.The Nabila was sold to the Sultan of Brunei to cover debts. The Sultan sold it to Donald Trump for $29 million, a fraction of what Khashoggi paid to build it. Trump eventually sold it to a Saudi prince as part of a deal to save his Taj Mahal casino from bankruptcy.
The estates were sold. The jets were repossessed. The fortune that took 25 years to build evaporated in less than a decade.
Khashoggi continued living lavishly even as his finances collapsed, desperate to maintain the illusion. But the world had moved on. The parties stopped. The phone calls stopped. The billionaire who once claimed to be the richest man on Earth was now just another cautionary tale.
In his final years, Parkinson’s disease ravaged his body. The man who had danced with movie stars and brokered billion-dollar deals could barely walk. His hands trembled. His voice weakened.
Finally on June 6, 2017, Adnan Khashoggi died at St. Thomas’ Hospital in London. He was 81 years old.
His nephew, journalist Jamal Khashoggi, attended the burial in Medina, even though he had publicly expressed nothing but disdain for his uncle’s grotesque excesses. A year later, Jamal himself would be murdered in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, a victim of the same brutal power structures that had once made his uncle fantastically wealthy.
Adnan Khashoggi’s life was a masterclass in excess, ambition and the terrifying speed with which fortune can reverse. He proved that you can own yachts and jets and palaces across three continents and still end up with 47 cents.
He spent decades proving he was the richest man on Earth. He spent his final years proving that none of it mattered.
The man who brokered billion-dollar arms deals couldn’t broker a deal with time, disease or mortality. The fortune disappeared. The parties ended and eventually the empire crumbled.
And in the end, Adnan Khashoggi, the “Great Gatsby of the Middle East,” the man who once claimed to own the world died with almost nothing.
