Dictator
Mohammed bin Salman
Saudi Arabia's de facto ruler since 2017, governing an absolute monarchy with no elected legislature.
Mohammed bin Salman, widely known as MBS, became Saudi Arabia's crown prince in 2017 and has functioned as the kingdom's de facto ruler under his father, King Salman, ever since. He has pursued a program of social liberalization — permitting women to drive and loosening guardianship restrictions — alongside an intensified crackdown on dissent, including the 2017 mass detention of rival royals and businessmen at Riyadh's Ritz-Carlton and the 2018 killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi inside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, an operation a US intelligence assessment concluded he had approved.
Saudi Arabia remains an absolute monarchy with no elected national legislature and continues to carry out one of the world's highest rates of capital punishment, according to figures compiled by Amnesty International, even as MBS has courted Western investment through his Vision 2030 economic diversification program.