Prince Alwaleed, singular Saudi scion A wrangle over a rich list reveals much about a royal with towering ambition, says Michael Peel Saudi Arabia's Prince Alwaleed bin Talal insists he will realise his dream of seeing the world's tallest building soar 1km above Jeddah - although the project is for now below rather than above ground. The billionaire nephew of King Abdullah says contractors are having to spend months driving piles deep into the earth of the notoriously flood-prone coastal city to support a structure that should one day surpass Dubai's 828m Burj Khalifa. "Building the highest rise tower is not that difficult," says the prince, whose Kingdom Holding investment vehicle has an indirect stake in the scheme. Unfortunately, before you go 1,000m up in the air, you have to go down 100m into the foundations. The scale of ambition, and the complications beneath, seem appropriate for a man who this week found his global investments and iconoclastic status at home under scrutiny. He fell out spectacularly with Forbes magazine over what he saw as a gross underestimate of his wealth in a rich list that gave him only $20bn, rather than the $29.6bn he says he deserved. Like the tower, the spat has provoked debate about whether a royal scion who provides a bridge to the Arab world for multinationals seeks business influence, political power or simple self-gratification - or perhaps all three at once. As one consultant who knows him puts it: "He wants to have the biggest and the tallest - which encapsulates his personality." The Forbes imbroglio began when the prince declared he was "severing ties" with the magazine, hours before it published a detailed investigation of his wealth. Forbes said its estimate reflected its belief that the true value of the prince's 95 per cent stake in his main company, Kingdom Holding, was much lower than its Saudi share market price suggested. The magazine said it was suspicious that for several years the stock had risen sharply during the period when Forbes collected its valuation data. Kingdom responded with a detailed rejection, describing the allegations of share-price manipulation as "completely unsupported and biased," an insult to Saudi market regulators. The prince is dismissive of what he calls a "personal vendetta." He says he is annoyed not because his ego is hurt but because questions over Kingdom's valuation could damage its commercial standing - and because of the disrespect allegedly shown to Saudi Arabia. "We are in the G20!" he says. Yet, for all his nationalistic ire, the prince is no typical member of the Saudi establishment. His father, Prince Talal, once headed the renegade Free Princes movement calling for reform in Saudi Arabia. Born in 1955, Prince Alwaleed was schooled in Saudi Arabia and Lebanon, followed by a Riyadh military academy, whose discipline he calls "one of the turning points in my life." He graduated in business administration from California's Menlo College in 1979, before starting - unsuccessfully - his investment career using $330,000 in gifts from his father. He says things took off only when he raised a further $600,000 by mortgaging a house, also given to him by his father, and invested the proceeds in Saudi's booming 1980s construction industry. After investing at home in sectors from petrochemicals to supermarkets, he hit the global big-time with a $590m stake in Citigroup in 1991, the stock multiplying in value more than tenfold by 2005. Other shareholdings include Apple, Procter & Gamble and, in a $300m investment announced in 2011, Twitter. He has developed links with companies with charismatic, powerful founders, such as Bloomberg, which will provide content for Alarab, a planned pan-Arab television venture. Rupert Murdoch's News Corp, in which Kingdom owns 7 per cent of voting shares, holds about 20 per cent of the prince's Rotana media group. He clearly enjoys the chance his status offers to mix in elite circles. He offers to send photos of last year's encounter with UK Prime Minister David Cameron, and lists royals and former premiers he has met. While he is primarily a businessman, and not seen as candidate for the throne, he describes himself as "implicitly immersed" in politics, his commercial standing a "jumping board to branch out to other aspects of life and society." The four-times married prince's most obvious political statement is his ditching of the convention of veiling and segregating women. He receives dignitaries alongside his bareheaded wife Princess Ameera, 29, and allows staff in his Riyadh tower to dress as they like. "Instead of women in burkas, it's women in mini skirts," recalls one person who has done business with Kingdom. This has triggered condemnation by conservatives - including Prince Alwaleed's brother, Khaled - and questions from reformers about whether this is empowerment or objectification. He retorts that he is fostering female participation in the labour market; 60 per cent of Kingdom's staff are women. "I do this as a responsibility and a duty," he says, adding that the same applies to the charity he offers dwarfs and others in the eclectic entourage at the 420-room complex containing his private offices and palaces for him and his two children. The prince is also a philanthropist, in areas from disease eradication to university endowment, although some dislike the attendant publicity - and others say he could invest in more pressing Saudi needs. As one Jeddah-based businessman puts it: "In a country with bad roads and no sewage system for most of the population, it's funny that we will have the world's tallest building." Prince Alwaleed has been shrugging off such comments for years. While some detect vanity behind both the Forbes firestorm and the tower project, he sees better motives. "We are doing it because it makes business sense for us," he says of the Jeddah building, which is expected to take another four years to complete. And if this will advance Saudi Arabia, so be it. The writer is the FT's Middle East correspondent. Additional reporting by Abeer Allam and Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson