(FORTUNE Magazine) – Prince Alwaleed bin Talal bin Abdul Aziz al Saud has just had an epiphany. "Murdoch should sell the Los Angeles Dodgers," he shouts, which is the way he talks when he thinks he's onto something. "It is not a core asset like TV and the movies--it drags those businesses down," he says, gesturing excitedly. At least I think he's gesturing excitedly. I can't really tell. It's the middle of the night, and the prince and I are moving on foot across a vast stretch of desert in central Saudi Arabia. Actually, we're almost jogging. The prince walks very, very fast, and I've already fallen twice.

For the prince this is a pretty routine Wednesday night. He's bound to have strong opinions about Murdoch; he holds nearly $900 million of News Corp. stock and therefore owns a piece of the Dodgers. As for walking fast, well, keeping up with him in any endeavor is a challenge. And, yes, he stays up all night and goes on treks across the desert. It helps him unwind. Usually he goes solo, but tonight he has taken me along, mostly, I think, to see whether I can make it back in one piece.

There are poisonous snakes here in the Ramah region, some 60 "clicks" northeast of Riyadh, though apparently they're hibernating now. What about getting lost? Not a chance. First of all, you can easily see the monstrous banks of lights at the prince's weekend desert camp three miles back (the weekend is Thursday and Friday in Saudi Arabia). But even if we managed to wander over the horizon, the prince carries a Motorola Star Tac that his boys can track off a radio signal beamed from a 240-foot tower back at camp.

The camp, in fact, bristles with technology. Sure, there are tents, a couple of dozen camels, and Bedouin retainers who might have stepped right out of the pages of T. E. Lawrence. But there are also mobile phones, faxes, printers, PCs, laptops, and a $700,000 custom Chevy Suburban communications truck. There's a satellite uplink too--in part so the prince's kids can play around on AOL when they visit. (He also happens to own about $600 million of AOL stock.)

When we finally return from our nighttime walkabout, the prince leads me to one of the campsite's open-air living rooms: an expanse of rugs half the size of a football field, bordered by big cushions against which card-playing Bedouins lean. Pots of tea and coffee simmer on grills above two fire pits. A half-dozen hooded hunting falcons roost silently on perches hammered into the bone-dry earth. And there are TVs. With the prince, there are always TVs. To the left of his carpeted command post, one big-screen behemoth carries Bloomberg. On his right, another has CNBC. A little 13-inch job at his feet is tuned to the ART network (Arab Radio Television, which is part-owned by the prince). The prince monitors all three. Suddenly something on CNBC catches his eye. It's a story about Goldman Sachs analyst Rick Sherlund's making negative comments about Microsoft. The prince grabs the phone and starts up in rapid-fire Arabic. The only words I can make out are "Rick Sherlund" and "Microsoft" and "Bloomberg." It takes just 15 minutes for an aide to stride over with a fax of the Bloomberg story with Sherlund's comments. At 3:30 in the morning. In the Saudi desert.

By now you're probably somewhat familiar with Prince Alwaleed, the Saudi royal who made his first billion buying a bundle of Citicorp stock when the bank was on the brink in the early 1990s. But the prince isn't just some wealthy oil sheikh who happened to hit one home run in the stock market. Though that richly appreciated Citi stock remains the cornerstone of his portfolio, over the past decade the prince has systematically created a global empire of investments in brand-name companies, worth, he says, some $17 billion. Today Prince Alwaleed, 44, has become a member of the upper-echelon billionaire elite. He's not quite in the same league as Gates (who is?), but he's right up there with Michael Dell and Steve Ballmer. In fact, partly because years of recession and turmoil in Asia have eroded so many great fortunes there, it now appears that the prince is the richest businessman in the world outside the U.S.

The prince has also become one of the world's leaders of the information technology industry. As an investor, he holds about $2 billion of Apple, Motorola, AOL, and Teledesic. Which is a paradox, because the prince is a committed value investor, and value investors don't usually own tech stocks. But Alwaleed bought these shares when they were values, finding entry points when they were "hammered," to use his term. And at this very moment the prince is hungrily eyeing another handful of tech stocks for a possible pounce.

But Alwaleed is more than simply an investor in tech. He has also become the first mover, as they say, in bringing digital technology to the Arab world, backing an Arab Web portal, an ISP, and a huge satellite wireless network.

Prince Alwaleed doesn't just invest in and fund technology, he swims in it! When Motorola first came out with the Star Tac, the prince ordered 200 of them for himself, his family, and friends. But he quickly ran out. So he bought another 200. And then another 100, and so on, until he'd bought and given away 700 phones. "There is a revolution going on here in the Middle East, just like America and Europe; only we are behind, of course, in telecommunications, in technology, and the Internet," the prince says. "So we'd like to prepare ourselves."

It makes sense that the prince should be one of the most wired men on the planet--more so than any of his billionaire peers or, for that matter, any Nethead slouching around Silicon Valley. Remember, this is a guy who lives in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, exactly 8,091 miles from Palo Alto. He can't just go over to Buck's in Woodside and network, right?

At one point I remark to the prince that in contrast with most American billionaires, who take pride in understating their wealth these days--Steve Ballmer could pass for a $600,000-a-year senior executive at Merck--His Highness seems to truly live like a billionaire. The prince nods his head and smiles: "I live too happily, for sure," he says. "I love it." And why not? If your lot in life happens to be "billionaire prince," why not live like a billionaire prince?

Let's start with the palace. Completed earlier this year at a cost of $130 million, and located within Riyadh, the style is, well ... How about "modern Arabian palace"? As we come to the gate (the guy driving says, "Open, sesame"--really!), it swings open to reveal a 20-foot-high wall-of-water fountain and a broad avenue lined with palm trees. The palace itself looks a bit like the world's swankiest Four Seasons, which is not a coincidence, since the prince owns 24% of the luxury hotel chain.

Inside, a 75-foot-high foyer is framed by dual winding staircases. There is ballroom after dining room after living room after bedroom wing after gymnasium. In all, 317 rooms, 400,000 square feet. At one point several of us actually got lost in the prince's closets. The palace has 520 TVs (somewhere Elvis is smiling), 400 phones, and eight elevators. And of course swimming pools (indoor and out), a screening room that beats David Geffen's hands-down, a bowling alley, tennis courts (indoor and out), and an Astroturf soccer field (that's outdoors). The staff, all 180 of them, carry walkie-talkies. All this for the prince, his new (third) wife, Princess Kholood, 22, and his two children from a previous marriage: Prince Khalid, 21 (see box), and Princess Reem, 17.

Even with two kids around, the palace doesn't feel very lived in. After our tour, which takes more than two hours, we meet up with the prince and describe a certain room and ask him about it. He turns to an aide and asks, "Which one is that?"

A man with a house like this must own some airplanes, right? Five or six Gulfstreams, maybe? Actually, no. He has no use for them. They're too small. When the prince travels, he takes along a couple of dozen people. This is a man who needs Boeing planes. He has a 737 and a 767. And a chopper and a 288-foot yacht, once owned by Adnan Khashoggi, which the prince bought from Donald Trump (during one of Trump's financial hammerings, of course). The boat is usually parked off the Cote d'Azur in the summer and serves as the prince's warm-weather retreat. As for other homes, he has none. Zip. When he travels, he stays at one of his hotels. The Four Seasons. The Plaza in New York (he owns 41%). The Fairmont in San Francisco (17%). Or the soon-to-be-reopened George V in Paris (100%).

Prince Alwaleed is the grandson of King Abdul Aziz al Saud, who created modern Saudi Arabia by uniting the kingdom in 1932. The prince's father, Prince Talal, brother of the current King Fahd, was sort of a black sheep of the Saudi royal family; he married the daughter of the Lebanese Prime Minister and ran off to Egypt for a time.

To this day the Saudi royal family is one of the most wealthy and secretive families on earth. It rules Saudi Arabia (or the "kingdom," as the country is often called) absolutely. The nation's economy is almost completely reliant on the price of a single commodity, which has been depressed for years. Its society is one of the world's most conservative--there is little political freedom, the press is censored, and women do not appear in public unless veiled and escorted. Many members of the royal family--including the prince--favor loosening these strictures. Some people, including elements of the Western political establishment, fear change would stir up Islamic fundamentalists and disrupt the status quo, i.e., the mutually beneficial exchange of oil for dollars. It is a very delicate balancing act.

Like every member of the Saudi royal family, Prince Alwaleed started life with silver prayer beads in his hand. But far more than any other member of this clan, the prince took his monthly allowance and ran with it. He graduated from Menlo College, south of San Francisco (at that time a favorite school for rich Saudis) and then got a master's degree in political science from Syracuse University. Though there are some who suggest that he is a conduit for the investments of other members of the royal family, the prince says he made his early millions speculating in real estate in Riyadh and trading stocks. If so, he must have had a real knack, because by early 1991 he was wealthy enough to snap up some $790 million of Citicorp stock. It was a master stroke, and that single position is up more than tenfold.

The prince wears traditional Arabic garb in the Arab world and Western clothes everywhere else. He stands about 5-foot-8 and weighs 140 pounds and has a slight tick whereby he jerks his head. He is prone to a bit of exaggeration and has a sizable ego. Perhaps that is understandable: Every week scores of Bedouins line up to kiss his shoulder (a greeting and a sign of respect for royal family members), read poems of adulation, and ask for money.

Though he's a bit brisk at first, the prince soon warms up, telling jokes in accented English. He seems most at ease with his Bedouin crew. They razz him, and he razzes them back--throwing cookies, for instance, at one old guy (either 95, 100, or 105, depending on whom you ask) who warbles some ancient desert love song.

They say the prince is loved in Saudi Arabia (there are no taxes in the kingdom, but the prince says he hands out $60 million a year in charity--that's off around $500 million of annual income). He is respected by those who work for him, though he's incredibly demanding; he's been known to delay an employee's paycheck after a failed white-glove inspection of his palace. "If you work for the prince, you are on call 24 hours a day, 365 days a year," says one of his top aides. The staff of Kingdom Holdings, as the prince's company is called, numbers only 20 or so professionals, mostly American-educated Middle Easterners (Saudis, but also Lebanese, Egyptians, and Palestinians) who manage his investments, hotel operations, and construction projects. Some are also stock traders and investors who have become wealthy in their own right.

It might be tempting to view the prince as an investor who was born on third base and thinks he hit a triple. Certainly he's not in Warren Buffett's league when it comes to analyzing financial markets and securities. Nor does he possess the technological expertise of a Gates or a Dell. But give the man credit: The prince knew enough to buy 6.2 million shares of Apple in March of 1997, when it was trading for about $18 a share. Today Apple sells for $96. That's nearly $500 million of profit in some 30 months in a high-profile stock that was sitting right there in front of everyone. As Citigroup co-CEO Sandy Weill observes, "You sure can't argue with results."

In the desert, at the prince's camp, the phone rings. The prince snatches it out of the cradle. "Yes. That's good. Yes," he says, then hangs up. "That was Paul Collins, vice chairman of Citigroup. Rubin is coming to Citigroup; it will be on the news right now." And 20 minutes later, so it is. Right there on CNBC.

Take a look at the prince's portfolio, and a couple of points jump out at you right away. First, the overwhelming majority of his holdings are plunked down in three stock groups: media, technology, and banking (he owns about 150 million shares of Citigroup, or 4.4% of its stock, worth $8 billion, which is why he got the courtesy call from Collins). If you were to travel back to 1990 and pick three sectors of the world economy to invest in, you couldn't do much better than that. What makes this even more impressive is that Alwaleed is a value investor who bought what are really growth stocks when they were cheap. He didn't get suckered into metal producers, for instance--which have always looked cheap but have gone nowhere--or oil, about which the prince says he knows nothing. Did he zero in on tech, media, and banking by design? "Yes and no," says the prince. "I really came to these groups because of the companies. I am always looking for the same thing: global companies with a brand name that are basically healthy but that have had a hiccup. That is what led me to these companies."

What the prince really is, of course, is a very successful portfolio manager. If you look at the world's richest men, they sort of fall into two camps. In one camp are the founders, like Gates and Dell, who have created their wealth from one great business. The prince falls into the second, which includes men like Buffett and Philip Anschutz, whose great skill is not managing businesses but deploying capital. Depending on how you look at it, the prince, as the great globalist of the group, either has it harder or easier than the others, since he has the whole world as his investing canvas. And he does have poles planted all over the world these days. North America. Asia. Europe. Africa. The Middle East. He has significant holdings everywhere. Well, almost everywhere. The prince didn't get snookered into Russia. "We went to Moscow, and there was nothing," he says, shaking his head. "Nothing."

One of the fictions of investing is that diversification is a key to attaining great wealth. Not true. Diversification can prevent you from losing money, but no one ever joined the billionaire's club through a great diversification strategy. Most often great wealth is created by making bold, concentrated bets. For instance, nearly half of the prince's $17 billion fortune sits in Citi stock. On Nov. 3, a $1 billion chunk of Citi stock was traded, and some immediately speculated that the prince was selling. Not so. In fact it would have been tricky for the prince to sell then, because the day before, Sandy Weill and his wife, Joan, had visited with him in Saudi Arabia. Though the prince is not an insider and can therefore buy or sell anytime--which is partly why he chooses not to sit on any corporate boards--it would look very bad for Weill if the prince sold 18 million shares after a prolonged and private audience with Citi's co-chairman.

The prince says he is delighted with Citi (interestingly, the bank has had strong ties to the Saudi royal family for decades). Bob Rubin's arrival, he says, "adds major credibility to our bank. But I do not believe he will succeed Sandy." As for the future of Citi, the prince says what you'd expect from someone who owns a yachtload of shares: "I believe Citigroup is a $100 stock. The full potential of the merger has yet to take place. Also cost reduction. And when the markets begin accepting that Citigroup is a global bank not susceptible to small increases in interest rates, that it grows 15% to 20% every year, then the P/E multiple goes up from 15 to 20. I am patient. I have been hammered twice with Citibank, very badly. I'm a long-termer. I'm not a seller." Remember, if the prince does hang on to all of his Citi stock, then for all practical purposes, where Citi's stock goes, so goes the prince's fortune. During my visit Citi stock moves from $46 to $53, adding about $1 billion to his net worth. No wonder he's in a good mood.

But many of the prince's big non-Citi holdings, particularly his tech stocks, have also been on a hot streak lately. A quick review: We've already mentioned how he jumped into Apple in early 1997. Why? Was that because he saw Jobs had come back? "No," says the prince, "that was before Jobs returned [Jobs' redux was July 1997]. I looked at Apple and said, This company has an incredible name. It can't just evaporate. Worst-case scenario, it would be a candidate for a takeover. Some companies did talk to me about taking over Apple. One of them is Oracle--Mr. Ellison. The other I can't name." Was it IBM? The prince won't say. "When Jobs came back, he proved how lousy, bad, and disastrous the management was. All the people between Jobs No. 1 and Jobs No. 2 were lousy." The prince tells of meeting Jobs in Cupertino, Calif., two years ago. "He ran up with a new iMac. That Jobs, he is different." So is the prince in this one for the long haul too? "For the long haul."

In October of 1997, with the markets doing their usual fall swoon, the prince made two other big bets on tech, buying pieces of Netscape and Motorola. At first neither move looked particularly astute. He bought some six million shares of Motorola at around $76, and over the next 12 months the stock promptly fell all the way down to $38. Abracadabra, the prince is out some $228 million. You know the story about Motorola: bad chips, bad phones, bad management moves. But since that low last year, the stock has headed due north, soaring to about $90 in early November. So now the prince has a $538 million stake in Motorola, and abracadabra, he's up $82 million. "Sure, that stock could have stayed down for three or four years, but when we analyze a company we really do it, so we knew that we had a plan, and thank God we were proven right."

Not that the prince hasn't had issues with Motorola. They come up when I ask him about his 15% stake in Teledesic (Craig McCaw's ambitious wireless network based on a series of satellites), which he bought for $200 million and which is now worth $300 million. "Teledesic is feeling the hurt right now because of problems with Iridium and Globalstar, which I was offered to invest in and didn't, thank God. Teledesic is fundamentally different because it is broadband, the Internet in the sky. And because it is voice and data and possibly video. It is well financed, no leverage, and is backed by incredible people. Now, frankly speaking, this may not make those people happy over at Motorola, but Motorola was one of the causes of the collapse of Iridium. They made a lot of money by selling technology to this company. They were milking it completely. And I told [Motorola CEO Chris] Galvin that, when he came to see me last week."

As for Netscape, it too went south after the prince bought four-plus million shares for $130 million. But then last fall, after AOL announced it was buying the browser company in a stock swap, Netscape shares began climbing. This spring, when the deal was completed, the prince's Netscape holdings were exchanged for four million shares of AOL, now worth $600 million. "Netscape to me was just like Apple. It was down, but it wasn't going away. Again, I thought maybe a takeover. Actually, in my meeting with Barksdale, I told him, 'Why don't you think of a takeover by some company?' He said, 'Well, we don't rule it out, Prince.' I am in AOL by default, but I don't mind. It's one of the only Internet companies that makes money. My average cost is $30, and the stock is $150. I'm happy."

Okay, but what about some of the prince's greatest misses? Yes, he has some very high-profile duds. Like Planet Hollywood. The prince sank some $110 million in that debacle, which has been whittled down to $40 million--though he now owns 20% of the company and is convinced it will rebound. (Disney apparently was sniffing around recently, looking to buy the All-Star Cafe chain, which is part of the same company.) And speaking of Disney, the prince's investment in Euro Disney has pretty much gone nowhere, so that's a $320 million investment just spinning its wheels--though he does stay chez Mickey when he's visiting Paris, while the George V is being renovated. Daewoo has also been a bust, though it will likely be restructured. And then there's Donna Karan. He put in $20 million, which is now down to $13 million. What in the world did he see there? "It was for my daughter," the prince confesses. "She's my partner in that one." (And, in fact, Princess Reem's quarters are festooned with DKNY.) All told, the prince's losses in these investments--both realized and unrealized--are somewhere around $150 million, which is not so bad, considering it about equals his gain in any one of his big recent winners. "This is a portfolio," says the prince. "Of course that happens."

The only non-Saudi part of his empire that the prince's company actually manages is the hotel properties. In fact his hotel people, based in Riyadh and New York, are busy expanding in the Middle East, as well as looking to consolidate their holdings into what might turn out to be a publicly traded entity not far down the road. But how're they doing managing the hotels? Pretty dang well, if you believe Warren Buffett. In May, Buffett wrote the prince about his stay at the Plaza: "You have restored the Plaza to its former luster--indeed your managers have enabled it to surpass its previous heights--and I congratulate you." (After the prince responded, Buffett wrote back, "In Omaha, I'm known as the 'Alwaleed of America'--which is quite a compliment.")

As it turns out, some of the prince's biggest moves lately have been in European media stocks. (It's worth noting here that his News Corp. stock has been treating him royally of late, up $300 million over the past two years.) He recently bought 3% of Kirch Media of Germany. Together with his 3% stake in Mediaset, the big Italian TV and publishing company, that brings his European media holdings to more than $500 million. The prince also owns small bits and pieces of all kinds of stuff. Like 5% of TWA. And 3% of Saks. And 5.5% of Saatchi & Saatchi.

The prince repeatedly says that he thinks the U.S. stock market is overvalued, which is vexing for him, because obviously it is the venue that has the greatest appeal for him. It's where the big companies are. The marquee names. The big brands. The liquidity. And yet, even with stock prices so high, there's a group of about six to eight large, globally branded, down-but-not-out companies that the prince is monitoring. He's watching three or four of them like a falcon. Think about it for a while, and you can pretty much figure out which ones they are.

Spend some time outdoors in Saudi Arabia in the middle of the day, and you begin to see why the prince is such a night owl. A visit to some of the prince's construction projects gives me a taste of a typical Saudi afternoon: not a cloud in the sky, temperature hovering around 97 degrees Fahrenheit. In the shade. And this is fall. On the outskirts of Riyadh the light is so bright that the world is reduced to white and tan. Your eyes beg you to put on sunglasses. But we leave the swelter as we enter a nearly completed school the prince is building, a $90 million construction project--built, like everything else in Saudi Arabia, by hundreds of workers from Pakistan, Bangladesh, and India. Though the unemployment rate in the kingdom is said to be as high as 30%, Saudis are not keen on construction work.

In some respects the school will be no different from schools built here for decades, conforming to rigid Islamic precepts separating male and female students. But look closer, and you'll find that the school will be as cutting-edge as anything built in Seattle or San Francisco. At the school's core is a gigabit Ethernet backbone network, run on the latest hardware from Cisco. (That company will train technicians and teachers.) Every student will have an iBook and Internet access. The construction manager proudly shows off the ports in the classrooms' floors.

The prince is helping to bring the Internet economy to the Middle East and North Africa. A drop-in-the-bucket market, you say. Syria, for instance, doesn't even have mobile or paging yet. Well, yes, but the Middle East does have at least one attribute that the boys on Sand Hill Road will find compelling: one language. There are some 270 million Arabs in the world, spread mostly across the Middle East and North Africa, all speaking Arabic. Sure, disposable income is only a fraction of Europe's, but at least you don't have the problem of trying to wire up the Greeks to the Danes.

Turns out that much of the digital-communication action in this part of the world is run through a company 25% owned by the prince (surprise, surprise), called Silki La Silki. Translation: cable and no cable (like Cable & Wireless). "Also, the name is like music in Arabic," says company president Abdul Aziz Al Hagbani. (Like music in English too, I tell him!) Silki La Silki controls an ISP called PrimeNet, headquartered in a dusty office building in downtown Riyadh. Walk in the door, and.. voila!, a real ISP, complete with six Sun Enterprise 450 servers, Cisco routers and cache engines, and Oracle database software. Customers? Well, only 7,500, and I happen to pop in during prayer time, so traffic is down to a trickle, but volume is growing faster than Saudi Telecom can handle.

Besides building pay-phone networks in Syria and Saudi Arabia, Silki La Silki is also working on a satellite network that will blanket 99 countries in the Middle East and Africa. But the really exciting piece of this company could be Arabia Online (go to arabia.com), an Arab portal. Through Silki La Silki, the prince recently bought 50% of this business, which is run by Ramzi Zeine, a Jordanian out of Amman, for $1.2 million. (That's million.)

Now, think about that. Arabia Online has about 400,000 unique users each month and is growing the way a popular new Website should. Zeine is talking to American VCs right now, and then he'll look for strategic partners (i.e., including a big U.S.-based portal); he hopes to take this company public on Nasdaq as soon as next year. A similar proposition like StarMedia (a Latin portal) has a market cap of $1.9 billion. Say Arabia Online--which unlike StarMedia has virtually no competition--has a market cap only half as big (and, remember, 270 million Arabs). Then that 50% stake the prince bought for $1.2 million would be worth $475 million. Could be one of the prince's biggest hits ever.

As the Middle East inexorably--albeit slowly--gets wired, the prince stands to make out coming and going. The populace will buy Macs and Moto phones. They will dial in to the Internet through his telecom networks, using his ISP. And they will log in to AOL and Arabia Online. Talk about setting yourself up for the next millennium!

The prince, though, is wired already. His world is powered by a pair of Compaq servers linked to four T-1 lines hooked up to a network node in Boston. The prince requires that he have T-1 or equivalent access pretty much all the time. Not just in Riyadh or the desert camp, but on his boat, on the planes, and in hotel rooms--everywhere. Here is a partial laundry list of IT equipment required on all of his trips: HP 1100 printer, Canon Multipass C5500 fax/copier, IBM 380D laptop, IBM 600E laptop, Sony laptop, Kodak Digital camera, two Motorola walkie-talkie sets, Motorola phone sets, Iridium phone set, and so on. And then there's one more piece of hardware, the one his staff finds most terrifying. Everywhere the prince travels, he brings an ordinary touch-tone phone, just like the ones he has at home. The No. 1 speed-dial button is programmed to ring at the palace, and when the prince hits that button, anytime, anywhere in the world, he expects to get the palace. Period. Needless to say, this tiny little request keeps his travel and telecom guys in a state of absolute telecom panic. (As in, it's 3 A.M. in Kuala Lumpur. "Quick, where's the satellite uplink?")

The prince's infatuation with technology is really the product of two deeply conflicting desires. He wants to live in Saudi Arabia. And he wants to be in touch with everything in the world instantaneously. Sometimes this results in operations right out of James Bond. Not long ago he sent Hisham Fleihan, head of his travel staff, to the Bentley factory in Crew, England, to check out some new cars. Fleihan brought along his new Sony Vaio with its Integrated Swivel Motion Eye Camera. Fleihan snapped pictures of the Bentleys with the Vaio and then immediately e-mailed them back to the prince for his perusal. "I travel in advance of the prince and take pictures of the hotels for him to see with the Sony," says Fleihan. We could all use a guy like Fleihan and his Vaio.

But in the end, the prince is always happiest back at his desert camp. For him, staying up all night watching business news and poring through periodicals is relaxing. And as the hours wear on toward dawn, we are still very much in never-a-dull-moment territory. I'm taken over to a caravan of camels and given a milking lesson (drink right out of the pail!). And finally the all-night Bedouins' card game is winding down. The Bedouins get paid hundreds of dollars a day by the prince, just for being a member of the posse. (Nice work, if you can get it. But you can't.) The guys often play cards for a big pot of prize money, but tonight the prince has announced that the winner gets a new car. Over the hours, the number of Bedouins playing shrinks until we're down to a final four. Sometime around 4:30 a.m., a portly fellow bounds straight up in the air from a seated position on the carpet. He rushes the prince and gives him a big hug. Yes, I think we have a winner here! Then comes dawn, and the prince's cleric calls the faithful to prayer. A huge breakfast, including fish and hot dogs, awaits us on the floor of a tent. The prince will sleep a few hours after that and then begin another endless day.

There is so much about the prince that's difficult to fathom. But then again, he comes from a different place, almost a different time. Here is a man who began his life not far removed from the era of Seven Pillars of Wisdom and is now thriving in the Digital Age. It's the prince's world, and from his perspective it all makes perfect sense. And as Sandy Weill says, you sure can't argue with results.

REPORTER ASSOCIATE Angela Key