Inside the germy, sneeze-filled meeting between Morgan Stanley’s CEO and the Saudi crown prince at the onset of COVID-19

Inside the germy, sneeze-filled meeting between Morgan Stanley’s CEO and the Saudi crown prince at the onset of COVID-19

James Gorman nervously eyed the gold-plated tissue box. He was in the royal palace in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, seated to the right of the country's crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman. It was early March 2020, and the Morgan Stanley CEO was on the second leg of a three-day trip through the Middle East to visit with clients and dignitaries. The United States had just from COVID-19 a few days earlier — a man in his 50s in Washington State. There appeared to be an outbreak of cases at a long-term care facility near Seattle, and there were pockets of cases in California, Illinois, and Massachusetts, too. Life was continuing mostly as normal, though, in America. It hadn't occurred to Gorman to cancel the trip. Globe-hopping was central to the role of any modern CEO, especially on Wall Street, where bankers lined up to advise governments on and investing their money. These trips also provided a window into global trends that was hard to get even from New York, the crossroads of global capital, and in early March, such windows were hard to come by. Gorman's first stop had been Kuwait, where a security officer had put a temperature scanner to