"These oil barons"? Dubai is not oil rich. That is why it has built its economy on trade. I could understand people misunderstanding this in the early millennium when Dubai was just starting to rise to its global importance, and they had only Arabian-peninsula stereotypes to go by. But it baffles me how people don't know this by now. They most might have learned it, for example, from the fallout of the 2008 crisis which hit Dubai's trade and real estate-based economy and forced it to turn to other parts of the UAE which do have oil.