How Sovereign Wealth Funds Are Quietly Reshaping American Culture
When Norway discovered oil in the North Sea, it determined to share the wealth with its own population, creating accounts for its citizens. Many oil-producing countries, such as the OPEC nations, have done the same thing. This pooled capital is referred to as a “sovereign wealth fund.” These funds have great power, since they invest in companies and can make all the difference to a startup, or even a sector of the economy. Wealth managers for these funds all buy government bonds for their portfolios.
Norway’s Cuts to U.S. Treasuries
Recently, Norway’s $2.3 trillion Government Pension Fund Global moved markets with a letter to its Finance Ministry proposing to cut government bond holdings from 70 percent to 50 percent of its bond index, hitting U.S. Treasuries hardest, with a suggested cut of roughly $80 billion of its $215 billion Treasury position. Separately, the fund is weighing a bigger allocation to unlisted private assets, and Norway’s parliament has already voted to review a 20-year ethical ban on investing in nuclear weapons-component makers such as Lockheed Martin and Boeing. Norway discloses this; most sovereign wealth funds don’t.
That’s the real story behind Norway’s headline: A small handful of state-owned investment funds, controlling many trillions of dollars, is reshaping American finance, entertainment, and education, and doing so with wildly uneven transparency. The Sovereign Wealth Fund Institute’s Linaburg-Maduell Transparency Index scores funds on a 10-point scale of public disclosure. Norway and the UAE’s Mubadala score a perfect 10. Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF), one of the most aggressive dealmakers in American culture, scores just 6.
Middle East Funds
The Saudi Public Investment Fund’s American footprint runs from Uber, Lucid, and Live Nation to a pending $500 million-plus stake in Endeavor, the talent agency representing Ben Affleck and Matt Damon. Its gaming subsidiary, Savvy Games Group, holds stakes across the industry and is now part of a consortium in the pending $55 billion acquisition of Electronic Arts — one of the largest deals in gaming history. The Hollywood Reporter frames Saudi Arabia’s entertainment spending as an image-rehabilitation campaign following the 2018 murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi — a killing that U.S. intelligence attributed to Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. Yet the Saudi Public Investment Fund is unlike most U.S. investment funds in one critical respect — it isn’t required to disclose its full holdings.
Meanwhile, Qatar has given American universities roughly $7.7 billion since 1986, and more than $1.1 billion in 2025 alone — more than any other country, including China — under Section 117 of the Higher Education Act, which requires disclosure of foreign gifts over $250,000. Cornell alone has received $2.3 billion, mostly for its Weill Cornell Medicine campus in Doha; more than $100 million was reportedly rerouted through a university research station in a way researchers say avoided full disclosure.
Between February and December 2025, universities reported more than $2 billion in foreign funding, and Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania, UC Berkeley, and the University of Michigan are now under federal investigation for inaccurate or untimely disclosures. Scholars are divided on what this means. Some call the raw dollar figures alarming evidence of influence-buying; Barnard College’s Alexander Cooley calls country-of-origin totals, without context on what the money actually funds, “a very crude snapshot” that “invites politicization.”
Foreign Influence in American Culture
Enormous pools of state capital, controlled by unelected fund managers answering to foreign governments, now sit inside American entertainment companies, research universities, and Treasury markets, with transparency entirely dependent on each fund’s own choices and each country’s own disclosure laws. For a country whose markets, campuses, and culture increasingly run on this capital, that asymmetry should cause constitutionalists who believe in national sovereignty to start asking hard questions.
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