Karen Elliott House is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist with nearly five decades of experience covering Saudi Arabia. Her deep expertise informs her latest book, The Man Who Would Be King: Mohammed bin Salman and the Transformation of Saudi Arabia, which draws on more than half a dozen in-depth interviews with the Crown Prince himself. House spent over 30 years at The Wall Street Journal, serving as a reporter, editor, and ultimately publisher. She is also the author of On Saudi Arabia: Its People, Past, Religion, Fault Lines—and Future.
The Man Who Would Be King is based on exclusive interviews, an eye-opening biography of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS), head of the House of Saud, the calculating ruler of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, and a central Middle East power broker.
Drawing on fresh, headline-making reporting, House balances both sides of this complex ruler. We are introduced to MBS the visionary, who has ushered in reforms for women, opened the closed kingdom to tourism, and placed long term bets on green energy and trillion-dollar giga-projects like The Line, a hundred-mile-long enclosed futuristic city in the dessert that will be run by AI. And we meet MBS the Machiavellian prince, widely accused of having Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi murdered, and of sports washing the kingdom’s reputation by investing billions in teams globally, from Premiere League soccer to the LIV (liv) golf tour to the World Cup which the Kingdom will host in 2034.
Karen Elliott House is also a senior fellow at Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, and Chairman of the Board of the Rand Corporation. She is a graduate of the University of Texas at Austin where in 1996 she was the recipient of the University’s “Distinguished Alumnus” award. She studied and taught at Harvard University’s Institute of Politics, and she holds honorary degrees from Pepperdine University (2013), Boston University (2003) and Lafayette College (1992). She is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.