Salami Amari

### Alma Mater

• University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign (B. Eng)• University of Pennsylvania, Wharton School (MBA)

• Harvard University (J. D.)

## Physical description

### Eye color

Brown

**Zain Faris Ciavàr "Salami" Amari** (also known as Sal Amari)is an Emirati born Saudi-Italian businessman, executive, and engineer. He is the CEO, COO, and Chairman of the multinational oil company Amari Group. As of November 2050, he has an estimated net worth of $177.42 billion, making him the second richest person in the world, after Colin N. Ellis, the CEO of Andrews-Ellis Holding.

Amari was named as the Chief Executive Officer of the Amari Group on January 13, 2021. During his stay as CEO, revenue from the company increased from $49 billion in 2020 to over $210 billion in the end of the fourth quarter of the same year. Amari was given a $247 million bonus that year in stock options, and quickly became the largest individual shareholder since October 2021.

Before joining the Amari Group, Amari was the senior vice president of Saudi Aramco's Asia-Pacific Operations. During the merger of Saudi Aramco and Sinopec in July 2020, Amari was named the Chief Technology Officer for his contributions in underwater Pacific oil drilling operations. He quickly assumed the position of interim CEO after the former CEO of Amari Corp, Gilbert Chong, was forced to step down after alleged stock market manipulation incidents. He became the full time CEO two days after. The company was shortly restructured and renamed after him after the nomination.

## Early Life

Amari was born on 12, February 1990 in Dubai Marina, Dubai, United Arab Emirates. He is the son of Amir Amari, a Saudi architect for the Coleman-Miller Group, and Isabella Amari (née Nervetti), a mechanical engineer for ATD Systems from Milan, Italy. At the age of 13, his family moved to Los Angeles, California in the United States for his father's work, which was accepting contracts from the nearby city of San Angelo, California.

Amari received his primary and secondary educations from private education institutions. In 2008, he graduated from Northridge high school as a valedictorian. He entered the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign on a full scholarship as a chemical engineer and earned his Bachelor's of Engineering in 2012, where he graduated *summa cum laude*. Amari continued his education following his graduation and received his MBA in 2015 from the University of Pennsylvania Wharton School of Business. In 2018, Amari received his J.D. degree from Harvard Law School.

## Career

### Saudi Aramco

Amari joined Saudi Aramco in late 2015 after graduating from the University of Pennsylvania. Under Saudi Aramco's Asia-Pacific Operations, he worked as a junior petroleum engineer on offshore drilling platform O*leum Amans* in the southeast Indian Ocean. During his stay on the O*leum Amans*, he led a group of seven chemical, geological, and petroleum engineers to develop a technology known as underwater zipper fracking to promote deepwater oil drilling.

Amari took a leave of absence in 2016 to enter Harvard Law School to obtain a law degree. During his study at Harvard Law School, Amari interned with German investment banking firm Boltzmann Seichtz under private equity management.

In May 2018, after obtaining his J.D., Amari returned to Saudi Aramco in the same division, though not as a petroleum engineer. The company's Asia-Pacific Operations was undergoing major restructuring due to the merger with Transpacific Oil, an Indonesia state-owned oil conglomerate. Amari worked under Mergers and Acquisitions along with investment bank Boltzmann Seichtz and negotiated the deal. The negotiation process lasted seven months and was considered to be one of the toughest business deals of the century. The terms included a purchase of $180 billion worth of Transpacific Oil stocks at $24 per share and a $320 billion transfer of assets and operations. The deal was followed through in November 2018, with Amari being named as the new Senior Vice President of the division, the youngest senior executive ever in company history, at the age of 28. Amari's promotion sparked controversy within the company structure, with certain executives disagreeing with the decision, citing that "Closing in on an M&A deal is not an example of leadership ... but rather, that of skills in negotiations only." Under Amari's leadership however, the Asia-Pacific Operations became one of the largest branches of Aramco, rising from $129 billion in assets in the second quarter of 2018, to over $400 billion in assets in the first quarter of 2019.

### Amari Corporation

#### As Chief Technology Officer

Wile aboard the Saudi Aramco *Oleum Aman*, Amari and a group of engineers developed a technique "underwater zipper fracking" for deepwater drilling to circumvent oil spill disasters like the 2010 British Petroleum oil spill. The technique allowed extensive drilling in the Pacific Ocean and other similar oil deposits.

After the discovery of the Great Pacific Oil Deposit in June 2020, Saudi Aramco merged with Sinopec, a state-owned Chinese oil firm to form the Saudi Arabia-China Oil Corporation. Proprietary technology supplied by Amari's underwater zipper fracking technique allowed the exploitation of the oil deposit, which greatly lowered the cost and became the basis of the new company's business model. As a result, Amari was named as the new CTO of the firm. Within the first six months of operation, the Saudi Arabia-China Oil Corporation was pumping out more than 1,000,000 barrels per day.

#### Promotion to Chief Executive Officer

The Saudi Arabia-China Oil Corporation named Gilbert Chong, then CEO of Sinopec, as the CEO of the newly created company originally in July 2020, as part of the merger agreements. Two weeks after the merger, Chong was linked to a major stock market manipulation incident that caused a temporary collapse in the Dow Jones Industrial Index from September 2016 to February 2017. Chong was later forced to resign as CEO, and the board of directors named Amari the interim CEO for his previous achievements as the CTO of the firm and as a senior vice president under Saudi Aramco. He later obtained a spot on the company's board of directors which subsequently renamed the company after him.