The order book for the bond sale has surpassed $85 billion, according to Bloomberg. Aramco had initially planned to sell about $10 billion worth of debt to help finance its $69 billion takeover of Sabic, a Saudi chemical producer.

Aramco executives got the red carpet treatment everywhere they went to hawk the bond offering last week. In London, prospective investors crowded into the upscale Corinthia hotel to hear about the deal. In New York, Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan Chase personally pitched the sale.

The attraction is simple. Aramco is wildly profitable — it made $111 billion last year — and dominant. “The more someone doesn’t need money, the more we want to give it to them,” Reza Karim of the fund manager Jupiter Asset Management told the NYT.

But some analysts worry about Aramco’s future. Both the Sabic deal and a push to take Aramco public are being driven by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, a change to the historical norm in which the Saudi royals basically left the company alone. (The crown prince plans to use the proceeds to wean Saudi Arabia off its dependence on oil.)

How investigators could pursue legal action against Boeing

Aircraft manufacturers like Boeing rarely face a criminal investigation over plane crashes. But Peter Henning of DealBook asks: What federal criminal laws are investigators looking at as they pore over Boeing’s records?

• “One statute they may consider is the federal false statements law. The broad statute is used when a company provides information to a federal agency like the Federal Aviation Administration to certify the safety of a plane and makes it a crime to provide an agency with ‘any materially false, fictitious, or fraudulent statement or representation.’ ”

• The criminal investigation may also examine a statute that “makes it a crime to ‘knowingly and with intent to defraud’ falsify or conceal a material fact about an aircraft part, or to make ‘any materially fraudulent representation’ about a part. It can be applied to conduct outside the United States so long as the company is organized under the laws of this country.”