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Comment by nwah1 | Hacker News Reader

It is amazing that after the massive negative repercussions for Saudi Arabia after their murder of Khashoggi, that the nations of the world somehow decided that such murder is more worthwhile than before.

Iran just murdered Roohollah Zam the other week.

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Regarding Khashoggi, I haven't been able to find an actual estimate of the costs of sanctions for Saudi Arabia so it is difficult to really evaluation how massive these negative repercussions are - but they actually seem pretty trivial to me.

Hard to put a price on reputation, but I suspect they have a harder time raising money for their Neom project

It rather smashed their attempt to economically open up Saudi Arabia to new forms of investment, at least for a decade. MBS had tried to set up a whirlwind effort to establish a 'new' Saudi Arabia and was spending a lot of money and effort to lure large investors to partner with. His 2018 tour of Silicon Valley, meeting with prominent tech players, wouldn't be possible post Khashoggi, those people stopped taking meetings with MBS afterward. Eventually the potentcy of that story will fade of course.

It's telling how the SoftBank Vision Fund has been ridiculed way more for bad investments than its Silicon Valley funding targets (https://visionfund.com/portfolio - this includes at least one prominent YC company which received its investment 3 months after the Khashoggi murder, btw) have been criticized for accepting Saudi blood money.

What massive negative repercussions?

I think the grandparent post was being sarcastic

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