The article offers a revisionist account of how the modern Saudi state emerged in the 1950s and 1960s. Differing with structuralist “rentier-state” accounts, I contend that individual agency has been very important in shaping the Saudi bureaucracy as oil money gave unique, although temporary, autonomy to princely elites to organize the state around their personal interests. Emerging institutions functioned as power tokens, leading to a fragmented administrative setup in which ministries serve as “fiefdoms” and bureaucratic capacities vary strongly from one institution to another. Through state growth and the “locking in” of distributional commitments, the autonomy of princely elites to redesign the state has strongly declined over time, meaning that many early institutional decisions have permanently impacted the shape and capacities of today's Saudi state. Vis-agrave;-vis rentier theory, I demonstrate that regime autonomy is not constant over time and that the quality of institutions is historically contingent and not determined by oil, which merely enlarges the menu of institutional choices available to rentier-state elites.