Liam Denning, Columnist

The Prince and the Martian: An Energy Fable

Mohammed bin Salman and Elon Musk are both trying the impossible.

December 28, 2016 at 1:00 PM UTC

Liam Denning is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering energy. A former banker, he edited the Wall Street Journal’s Heard on the Street column and wrote the Financial Times’s Lex column.

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At first glance, Mohammed bin Salman, Deputy Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, and Elon Musk, clean-tech mogul and budding red-planet pioneer, couldn’t be more different.

Prince Mohammed is an aristocrat in a country where women can’t drive, but which relies for its wealth on many women, and men, driving everywhere else. Musk, meanwhile, runs a California company posing a direct threat to oil, Tesla Motors Inc. Believe it or not, the royal is a millennial, while the CEO was born before the first oil shock.