The dirham stops with Tahnoon: Meet the man who runs one of world's hottest stock markets

A powerful sheikh calls the shots at one of the world's hottest stock markets, the Abu Dhabi Securities Exchange, which is now nearing nearly $1 trillion in value. 

As of March 2024, the ADX is ranked 17th in the world, ahead of Spain and Brazil. But it is all about Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan.

One of Abu Dhabi's two deputy rulers, national security adviser of the UAE and brother to its president, Tahnoon has his fingers in almost every pie of its business. 
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Tahnoon's firms had a weighting of at least 65% of the benchmark FTSE ADX General Index as of March 31.  

International Holding, or IHC, the biggest among them is up more than 400-fold since 2019. With investments ranging from Elon Musk’s SpaceX to a local fishery, IHC is at the forefront of a drive to diversify the economy of UAE and deploy its oil windfall overseas. 

The conglomerate is valued at almost $240 billion.

IHC also makes money from trading on the very exchange where it's listed. It owns the Abu Dhabi stock exchange's most active broker. 

The emirate's ADQ fund, which Sheikh Tahnoon chairs, oversees the exchange itself.  

Tahnoon, the de facto business chief of Abu Dhabi's ruling Al Nahyan family, helms two of Abu Dhabi's biggest wealth funds, Abu Dhabi Investment Authority and ADQ, and also chairs First Abu Dhabi Bank, the UAE's biggest lender by assets.

"The interlinkages of assets and the concentration of control in Sheikh Tahnoon's hands, despite being neither ruler nor crown prince, are unusual even by Gulf standards," Steffen Hertog, an associate professor at the London School of Economics, told Bloomberg. 

Despite owning over 10 companies on the exchange, IHC’s stock market forays simply issue a price on the bourse, and don’t use external banks as advisers. It also has a small free float. Since 2020, through the end of March, the total value of companies listed on UAE exchanges has nearly quadrupled, to $950 billion. (Saudi Arabia's market, at $3 trillion, remains the region's largest.) Abu Dhabi's benchmark index accounts for $711 billion. The rest is Dubai. Five of the 10 best-performing IPOs in the UAE since the start of 2021 have come from companies in his empire or controlled by the sovereign wealth funds he oversees. 

Ryan Bohl, of consulting firm Rane Network, told Bloomberg investors in the UAE may contend with less than clearly articulated policies. But the fact that so much relies on one royal provides one kind of clarity, he says: "The dirham, so to speak, stops with [Sheikh] Tahnoon."