Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, one of the world’s richest men, knows a thing or two about luxury hotels. He owns the Savoy, in London, and a big chunk of the Plaza Hotel, in New York, (as well as a stake in the Plaza’s condominiums.) Together with Bill Gates, the co-founder of Microsoft, he owns the Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts Company. He also owns the George V, in Paris. He bought it in 1996 for $175 million and spent another $125 million renovating it. He has since boasted to me that it is worth $1.5 billion. When I interviewed Alwaleed a few years ago for a profile in Vanity Fair, we met for the first time in the lobby of the Plaza, half of which he had commandeered for his considerable entourage. His gorgeous fourth wife, whom he has since divorced, was there, too, with her entourage. The second time we met was in the lobby of the George V. He was in command there, too.

Unfortunately for Prince Alwaleed, whose net worth is around $20 billion these days, one of the luxury hotel chains he does not have an ownership stake in, the Ritz-Carlton, is where he has been holed up in Riyadh against his will since Saturday, under house arrest, as part of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s sweeping (and shocking) power grab. Alwaleed is one of 11 Saudi princes, four ministers, and many other former ministers, who have been ordered arrested under the guise of the anti-corruption campaign. According to Reuters, he has been charged with money laundering, bribery, and extortion. “The homeland will not exist unless corruption is uprooted and the corrupt are held accountable,” Saudi King Salman decreed on Saturday before appointing his favorite son to head up an anti-corruption task force, which then ordered the arrests.

Alwaleed is a man who likes his creature comforts, and no matter how appointed the Ritz-Carlton in Riyadh may be—“lush with 600-year-old olive trees, landscaped gardens, and swaying palms,” according to company literature—he is unlikely to be very happy being kept there against his will. (Marriott International owns Ritz-Carlton.) Alwaleed, after all, is the founder and 95 percent shareholder of the publicly traded Kingdom Holding, a Riyadh-based investment holding company that he likens to Warren Buffett’s Omaha-based Berkshire Hathaway. (Alwaleed is not shy about comparing himself to Buffett). Kingdom Holding is in the process of building a $20 billion real-estate development in Jeddah, including the Jeddah Tower, slated to be the world’s tallest building. Otherwise, his holdings are notoriously opaque, and often difficult to verify; but, according to his website he claims he is the largest single foreign investor in the United States. (Short of owning a 5 percent stake in a public company, as per the S.E.C. requirement, Alwaleed is not obliged to disclose what he owns.) At times, he has been the single largest investor in Citigroup and second largest investor, after Rupert Murdoch, in News Corporation. It is believed, according to an interview he gave to CNBC last month, that he still owns stakes in Citigroup, as well as 21st Century Fox, which was spun out of News Corporation, as well as meaningful stakes in Twitter, Apple, Disney, and Motorola. He may, or may not, still own equity stakes in Time Warner, eBay, and Euro Disney, which he once rescued from bankruptcy. Alwaleed confirmed on CNBC last month that he still owns Citigroup, 21st Century Fox, Twitter, and JD.com, a Chinese Internet commerce company.

Alwaleed is also opaque about the magnitude of his personal wealth. Four years ago, he told me he was worth $29 billion, which is what the Bloomberg Billionaires Index pegged his net worth at then. But that was just as he was engaging in a public battle of wills against Forbes, which he felt underestimated his wealth by some $10 billion. Since his arrest, Bloomberg calculates his net worth at $20 billion, Forbes has him pegged at $16.7 billion. The small public float of Kingdom Holding has fallen more than 10 percent since his arrest became publicly known.