Saudi Arabia drew top finance moguls and political leaders to its Davos-style investment summit on Tuesday.

'Davos in the desert' reboot

Organizers say 300 speakers from over 30 countries, including American officials and heads of global banks and sovereign wealth funds, were attending the three-day Future Investment Initiative (FII), nicknamed "Davos in the desert."

"I have been coming to Saudi Arabia for 20 years but what I have been seeing particularly in the past two or three years is (economic) transformation," Indian tycoon Mukesh Ambani told the conference. "As a businessman and as an investor I'm all in."

Thousands of delegates, including world leaders and finance moguls, crammed into a chandelier-studded ballroom and conference area at Riyadh's palatial Ritz-Carlton hotel complex.

"More than 6,000 executives and participants are attending," said Yasir al-Rumayyan, chief of the kingdom's vast Public Investment Fund which organized the conference. "This is more than double the first FII. The growth has been incredible."

Who attended the FII? 

India's Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Brazil's President Jair Bolsonaro, leaders of key emerging markets, attended the summit along with King Abdullah II of Jordan and four African leaders.

U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin led a high-powered American delegation including Energy Secretary Rick Perry and Jared Kushner, son-in-law to President Donald Trump, who spoke at the summit of his Middle East peace plan.

A prime draw at the Riyadh conference is the much-delayed initial public offering of state oil giant Aramco, the world's most profitable company, of which global banks and consultants are vying for business.

The kingdom plans to list as much as five percent of the state oil behemoth, raising some 100 billion U.S. dollars in an exercise analysts say could put the firm's value at between 1.5 trillion U.S. dollars and 2 trillion U.S. dollars.