Silver Lake, Egon Durban and the courtship of Middle Eastern royalty
The meeting of minds between SoftBank’s Masayoshi Son and Saudi Arabia’s Mohammed bin Salman created the first big tie-up between a group investing in technology and an authoritarian regime.
Now, it is becoming increasingly clear that Silver Lake boss Egon Durban is intent on recreating a similar sort of alliance for his private equity firm with the emirate of Abu Dhabi.
On Wednesday, Silver Lake announced an $800m investment into a business that shows just how close the US tech investment firm is becoming with Abu Dhabi’s ruling elite and how enmeshed Durban is becoming with them.
The deal will see Silver Lake take a stake in Group 42, an Abu Dhabi-based company set up in 2018 that bills itself as a provider of artificial intelligence and cloud computing.
It featured in a January long-read by our colleagues Andrew England and Simeon Kerr who explained G42 was born out of the state security role held by Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed al-Nahyan. (He’s the UAE’s national security adviser, and the brother of Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed, Abu Dhabi’s crown prince and the UAE’s de facto leader.)
Along with being chair of G42, Sheikh Tahnoon manages a sprawling portfolio that straddles national security and the often opaque corporate sector in the UAE, per Andrew and Simeon’s feature.
So that may explain why G42, which is described as an AI provider, has found itself playing an active role in the UAE’s response to coronavirus and even started manufacturing the main Chinese vaccine domestically.
“G42 has quickly become a globally respected technology leader, poised to expand its technology portfolio and extend its leadership in AI and digital transformation,” Durban said in a statement. He will be joining the company’s board.
The move is the latest in Durban’s multiyear courtship of Abu Dhabi, a relationship born out of his close friendship with US talent agent Ari Emanuel, who runs the Endeavor agency.
That friendship led to a deal between Silver Lake and the Abu Dhabi-owned parent company of Manchester City Football Club in 2019, where the US group acquired a stake. The deal was followed up last year with Abu Dhabi state fund Mubadala acquiring a stake in Silver Lake and agreeing to put $2bn in a new investment strategy run by the firm.