Few companies seriously contemplated severing their contracts with Saudi clients, however. At The New York Times’s DealBook conference last week, Laurence D. Fink of the investment management giant BlackRock said that it was a “hard decision” to withdraw from the Saudi conference. But he unapologetically defended keeping the Saudi government as a client, saying that doing business there was “not something I’m ashamed of.”

At issue are the billions of dollars that Saudi Arabia has spread around the corporate world. The country has pledged to buy nearly $110 billion worth of arms from the United States, though so far it has spent only a fraction of that. Business from Saudi Arabia constitutes at least 15 percent of the revenue of BAE Systems, the British defense contractor. And consulting firms have courted the Saudi government for years, earning hundreds of millions in fees — to the point that the country’s planning ministry has been nicknamed the “Ministry of McKinsey.”

For SoftBank in particular, Saudi Arabia is a crucial part of its future.

The company, a Japanese internet, energy and financial conglomerate, has increasingly staked its future on its nearly $100 billion Vision Fund. The biggest technology investment firm in the world, the Vision Fund owns stakes in Uber, the co-working space provider WeWork and more.

The success of the Vision Fund has bolstered its parent’s earnings. SoftBank on Monday reported a second-quarter profit of 526.4 billion yen, or $4.6 billion, up fivefold from the same time a year ago, thanks to the Vision Fund’s sale of its stake in the Indian e-commerce company Flipkart to Walmart.

Mr. Son said on Monday that he predicted the Vision Fund to propel even more growth at SoftBank. “Next year, we will far exceed the scale we are seeing this year and maybe a scale that Japanese economy has never experienced before,” he told analysts.