My Ultimate Sign-in System Made Me Invincible

Chapter 611: A Different Kind Of Situation

While Washington ran threat assessments and Brussels mapped jurisdictional gaps and Beijing looked for doors that didn’t exist, the mood in three Gulf capitals was different.

Not calmer, precisely. The Bloomberg article had landed in Riyadh, Abu Dhabi, and Kuwait City with the same weight it had landed everywhere else, and the people who read it in those cities understood its implications as clearly as anyone in the NSC or the European Commission.

But understanding the implications and being troubled by them were not the same thing, and the three governments that had invited Liam Scott to the Middle East seven months ago were not troubled.

They were calculating.

Seven months ago, the footage of the aircraft that had no business being in private ownership has gone viral.

The next week, Saudi Arabia, UAE and Kuwait had each sent an invitation to Liam. He accepted the invitations and travelled to the Middle East for the meetings.

A week after the last of those meetings, Nova Technologies had released its first batch of Lucid devices. And it had not taken long to guess who was behind the company.

But there was no concrete confirmation they all could move on.

In the seven months since, each of the three governments had sent emails to the Bellemere Family Office. Not one email. Multiple emails, at different intervals, through different channels, with different framings — some formal, some deliberately informal, some attaching documentation of investment interest, some referencing specific areas of bilateral potential.

The sovereign wealth funds had reached out separately from the government offices. Individual ministers had added their names to correspondence that ambassadors had already sent.

None of it had received a response. Not even an acknowledgment or a standard reply indicating receipt. Nothing.

They were not alone in this. The Bellemere Family Office’s apparent policy of complete non-response to incoming correspondence had become, across seven months, one of the more discussed private institutional behaviors among the people who moved capital at scale.

Sovereign wealth funds from four continents had made contact. Governments had tried diplomatic channels and found them pointing at a wall. Investment banks had offered to facilitate introductions through the JP Morgan relationship and been politely informed that JP Morgan did not intermediate on behalf of its clients.

The wall was consistent and complete.

What the three Gulf governments had that every other party attempting contact did not, was a prior meeting. A real one.

It was a thin advantage. They were all aware it was thin.

He had been eighteen years old and not yet publicly known as anything beyond the owner of an unusual aircraft. The meetings had preceded Nova Technologies’ public existence by one week.

Whatever he had taken from those afternoons, it had not translated into any subsequent contact, any follow-up, any indication that the meetings had registered as significant on his end.

But it was the only advantage any party in the world had, and thin was better than nothing, which was what everyone else had.

The Bloomberg article changed the calculation in a specific way.

For seven months, the emails to the Bellemere Family Office had been sent by people who suspected but could not confirm who they were writing to.

The article removed the suspicion and replaced it with public documentation. Liam Scott was now the second richest individual on Earth with a verified wealth profile, a disclosed equity portfolio, and a name attached to seven months of the most consequential technological development any of them had watched in their lifetimes.

The wall was still the wall. But writing to it now felt different, because both sides of the correspondence knew the wall existed and knew that the person on the other side of it had chosen it deliberately.

In Riyadh, the conversation reached the Crown Prince’s office on the morning the article dropped and had a specific shape by noon.

The kingdom had spent fifteen years building the architecture for a post-oil economy — NEOM, the Vision 2030 framework, the Public Investment Fund’s accumulated positioning across technology, entertainment, and infrastructure.

The question was not whether Nova Technologies was worth engaging with. The question was what Saudi Arabia could offer that would make engagement worthwhile for the person they were trying to reach.

Land was one answer. The kingdom had committed to development projects at scales that required partners with capabilities no existing contractor had demonstrated.

Nova Technologies had demonstrated fabrication and construction capability on the moon. What that implied for terrestrial infrastructure was a question Saudi Arabia was willing to explore openly and fund significantly.

In Abu Dhabi, the framing was different. The UAE had spent decades positioning itself as the regional hub for everything — finance, logistics, aviation, technology, tourism. Jebel Ali was the largest port between Rotterdam and Singapore.

The UAE’s geographic position sat at the intersection of trade routes connecting three continents. The sovereign wealth funds — ADIA, Mubadala, ADQ — collectively managed capital at a scale that most governments could not match.

What Abu Dhabi was offering, in its unsent correspondence, was not access to a market. It was access to infrastructure that moved the world’s goods and capital and already did so at a scale Nova Technologies would eventually need.

Kuwait’s calculation was quieter and more specific. The Kuwait Investment Authority was the oldest sovereign wealth fund in the world. It had been investing globally since 1953 and had developed, across seven decades, a particular institutional competence in identifying positions worth holding before the world agreed they were worth holding.

The KIA had been watching Nova Technologies since Month 1 and had formed its assessment early. What Kuwait wanted was not a partnership in the operational sense. It wanted a relationship that kept it informed and positioned before the next announcement made positioning impossible.

Three governments. Three different things to offer. Each of them had spent the morning after the Bloomberg article dropped working out how to say what they were offering in a way that made it worth reading.

And each of them, separately and without coordination, arrived at the same opening line.

They had met him once. Before any of this. When he had come to them, at their invitation, and sat across a table and asked more questions than he answered and left without indicating whether it had meant anything.

It was a thin thread. But it was a real one. And the emails that went out from Riyadh and Abu Dhabi and Kuwait City that afternoon all pulled on it, carefully, because careful was the only approach that made sense when the person on the other end had spent seven months demonstrating that he responded to nothing and chose everything.

The Bellemere Family Office would receive the emails, but whether it responded was a different question entirely.