[cookingrobot]

Unlike (almost) every other business on earth where you have to do work and compete with peers to make a profit on your efforts, all the value of oil is sitting in the ground underneath them. Oil wealth is just luck of being born on top of the right geology.

[lotsofpulp]

And being part of an extremist tribe who were useful to the Brits/Americans versus the Ottomans in World War 1, who then continued to provide a “stable source” of oil. Stable because they stamped out any sort of democracy or society with freedoms that would allow anyone to object to their arrangements with the West, in exchange for one family of the tribe to become extremely wealthy.