Chaymae Samir

Chaymae Samir Entrepreneur | Forbes 30 under 30

10/09/2026

For a brief period in the 1960s, one of America’s most famous space-age products was… powdered orange juice.

Tang had been struggling to convince Americans they needed orange juice in powder form. Then John Glenn took it aboard Friendship 7, NASA kept serving it to astronauts, and suddenly drinking Tang felt like drinking the future.

But arguably the more interesting part of the story is what happened next.

Tang travelled far beyond the country that invented it, finding a particularly unlikely second life in the Arab world. Today, more than half of its annual Middle East sales happen in the weeks around Ramadan.

A drink made famous by the space race somehow became part of the ritual of breaking fast.

Which might be the strangest thing about global brands: where they begin isn’t always where they end up belonging.

07/09/2026

In 1912, Jacques Cartier got on a pearl-fishing boat in Bahrain.

At the time, natural pearls were among the most valuable objects on earth. A few years later, Cartier would famously trade two strands of them for a Fifth Avenue mansion, the same building that remains its New York flagship today.

But the market Cartier built its early fortune on didn’t last.

Cultured pearls eventually flooded the market, sending the value of natural pearls crashing. The blow was so significant that the Cartier family reportedly ranked it above the Great Depression.

By then, though, the pearls had already done their job.

Long before Cartier became synonymous with diamonds, watches and red boxes, some of the stones that helped make its name came out of the waters of Bahrain.

Here’s how a failed priest, a pearl boat, and a tiny Gulf island helped build one of the biggest luxury houses in the world.

04/09/2026

We’ve started new currencies. Can we start new countries?

It’s a fairly big question. So naturally, I’m moving in with the people trying to answer it.

For two weeks, I’ll be living at Network School, founded by Balaji Srinivasan, former CTO of Coinbase and author of The Network State.

I love tech. I love covering tech. But I’m no tech bro. I’ve never called myself a digital nomad, and living at a school among AI and crypto people wasn’t exactly on my vision board.

But I’m looking forward to it. Because the idea is fascinating.

The internet gave us communities that transcend borders, companies without headquarters and currencies without central banks. Could those same forces eventually produce something that looks like a country?

That would be an interesting story anywhere. But Network School is in Kazakhstan.

And Kazakhstan is running an almost inverse experiment of its own: trying to transform an existing country into an AI nation.

So after our first In Plain Sight there, I’m going back (the frames in this carousel are from the last trip). This time, I’ll be talking to Balaji Srinivasan, Deputy Prime Minister Zhaslan Madiyev, Astana Hub - Innovation cluster CEO Madiyev Magzhan and others.

Naturally, I have questions. Many questions.

What should I ask? Where should I go? And who am I missing?

16/08/2026

Comment READ and I’ll send you the full deep dive.

For a brief period in the 1950s, Iraq had assembled something approaching an architectural Avengers.

Frank Lloyd Wright was designing an opera house. Le Corbusier, a 50,000-seat stadium. Walter Gropius, a university. Gio Ponti, government offices.

Today, that list sounds almost unbelievable. And that might be the most interesting part of the story.

We have become much better at documenting Iraq’s destruction than explaining what was there to destroy. So much so that an ambitious, modernising Baghdad now feels like the surprising version of Iraq.

This week’s letter goes deeper into the economics, architecture, and what happens when we let catastrophe rewrite everything that came before it.

12/08/2026

Why is the Nissan Patrol everywhere in the UAE?

The answer starts long before highways, skyscrapers or even the UAE itself.

It starts with the collapse of the Gulf’s pearl trade, a family forced to reinvent its business, and a Japanese 4x4 that arrived at exactly the right moment.

By the 1960s, Mohammed Bin Masaood was importing Nissan vehicles into Abu Dhabi. Then, after the UAE was formed, his company made the move that would define its future: thousands of cars were supplied to Emiratis as part of a government-backed initiative.

The Patrol wasn’t just entering a new market, it was becoming part of a country being built.

Decades later, that helps explain something you notice almost immediately on UAE roads: Patrols are everywhere.

11/08/2026

I stayed in Clifton because it was one of Karachi’s nicest neighbourhoods. Then I started wondering why it was called Clifton.

The answer took me back to 1843.

Before the British conquest of Sindh, this stretch of coastline was known locally as Hawa Bandar, “Wind Port.”

Within decades, it had become a seaside retreat for colonial officials escaping the heat, disease and density of the city they were governing.

They built bungalows, drove along the seafront and eventually nicknamed it the “Brighton of Karachi.”

08/08/2026

apparently, this is 33. a lot to be grateful for, even more to look forward to, and quite curious to see what happens next. I suppose I have a year to find out. possibly a few more, if I’m lucky.

05/08/2026

Saudi Arabia is spending $7B+ trying to build the Red Sea’s answer to the French Riviera, from scratch, in the middle of nowhere.

What’s wild is the comparison isn’t as far-fetched as it sounds: St Barths started as a salt-trading backwater until a Rockefeller bought land there for $32,500 in 1957. The Maldives’ first resort in 1972 had no airport and ran on a ham radio.

So can you manufacture exclusivity from scratch?

Monaco took 200 years. St Barts took 50. Saudi Arabia is trying to do it in 10. That has never been done before.

04/08/2026

Riyadh looks chaotic from the ground. From above, it tells a very different story.

In the late 1960s, as the Saudi capital was growing at extraordinary speed, a Greek urban planner sitting thousands of kilometres away was given the task of imagining what Riyadh would become.

Constantinos Doxiadis had already helped design Islamabad. For Riyadh, he proposed something unusual: a vast grid oriented southwest toward Mecca.

More than half a century later, millions of people move through Doxiadis’ idea every day, mostly without knowing his name.

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