6 ideas
The Saudi state is best read not as a government but as a family enterprise that happens to hold sovereign power: oil revenue is treated as family income, ministries as family divisions, and citizens as outside stakeholders rather than principals. Seen this way, decisions that look irrational as public policy become coherent as moves to protect and distribute the family's private stake.
Thousands of royals receive stipends scaled by lineage and closeness to the throne, which turns the ruling family into a salaried class whose loyalty is bought rather than earned. Because the stipend rolls grow with each generation, they impose a fixed, rising cost on the treasury that cannot be cut without risking internal revolt.
On arms deals and large infrastructure contracts, princes and their middlemen take commissions that are priced into the deal, so the state pays inflated sums and part of the surplus flows back to the family. The procurement choice therefore follows who gets paid rather than military or economic need, and the commissions leave foreign suppliers and governments complicit in the arrangement.
Western governments protect the House of Saud because of oil supply, arms sales, and recycled petrodollars, and so they overlook its corruption and repression. This outside backing removes the pressure that would otherwise push the rulers toward accountability, which lets the rot deepen instead of being corrected.
Power is divided among competing branches of the founder's sons, especially the Sudairi full brothers against the rest. Succession is settled by bargaining among branches rather than by clear rules, so each transfer of power reopens the fight over offices and money and makes a destabilizing split possible.
The family's right to rule rests on its alliance with the Wahhabi clergy and on its claim to guard Islam's holy places. Open royal extravagance and hypocrisy wear down that religious legitimacy, which hands the most potent grounds for opposition to Islamist critics and makes eventual collapse more likely than gradual reform.