Egypt’s relationship with Saudi Arabia has had immense consequences for Egypt’s economic, social, and religious development. This paper deepens our understanding of the enduring Egyptian-Saudi entanglement by exploring its origins in the political partnership between the al-Sadat regime and the Saudi monarchy in the 1970s. It argues that the two countries’ deep connections were a deliberate construct of a small group of counterrevolutionary Saudi and Egyptian elites seeking to reverse the legacies of Nasserism and remake Middle Eastern regional politics. These elites set in motion a larger set of economic and transnational exchanges. The paper examines recently declassified US and British consultations with Saudi and Egyptian leaders alongside Arabic-language Egyptian memoirs, including those of Sadat’s emissaries to the Arab Gulf monarchies. In their conversations with senior American and British officials, members of the Saudi royal family made explicit their ambitious goals to remake Egypt's economy and society along counterrevolutionary and anti-communist lines and to reorient Egypt away from the Soviet Union. Saudi officials employed subsidies and economic integration to achieve these goals. The paper shows how a small network of Saudi and Egyptian political and business elites designed the Egyptian policy of Infitah (or the Open Door) to facilitate the flow of Saudi and Gulf Arab capital into Egypt. Saudi leaders leveraged their financial subsidies to push Sadat toward specific economic, religious, and foreign policies that reversed the legacies of Nasserism and revolutionary Arab Socialism. As Prince Fahd of Saudi Arabia (somewhat prematurely) boasted to the US Ambassador in 1973, “Saudi influence had been brought to bear to encourage the elimination of the last vestiges of Nasserism in the Egyptian economy.” Sadat, in turn, viewed Saudi Arabia as a source of subsidies and a bridge to the US. In implementing infitah, he hoped to realign Egypt’s economy with the US and Western Europe. In practice, his policies instead bound Egypt in relations of dependency with Saudi Arabia and the other oil-producing Gulf monarchies. The deep legacies of the Saudi-Egyptian entanglement manifested themselves after 2011, when Saudi Arabia supported Egyptian elites aiming to overturn the country's revolution. This paper clarifies that the Saudi state’s support for the Egyptian counterrevolution was consciously engrained in the Egypt-Saudi partnership from its point of origin in the 1970s.