This paper analyzes why, in recent years, entrepreneurship has become an organizing principle guiding contemporary youth policy across Arab autocracies. I begin by arguing that the turn towards entrepreneurialism must be understood in the context of autocracies’ search for sustainable forms of rule in the post-welfare era. In recent decades, as ongoing neoliberal economic reforms undermined regimes’ ability to respect traditional welfare-oriented social contracts, some regimes crumbled under formidable oppositions during the Arab Uprisings, while others survived by selectively honoring old social contracts while suppressing resistance. However, today, regimes face a numerically sizable young generation who has inherited expectations of modern transitions to adulthood, characterized by longer education and marriage after securing stable wage employment. Yet, economic conditions and policies mean that youth suffer from failed modern transitions and protracted unemployment and waithood, a combination which risks breeding an economically and politically disaffected future citizenry potentially threatening regime stability in the long run. Scholars have analyzed regimes’ adaption to unraveling social contracts primarily by focusing on the reconstitution of ruling elites, while largely ignoring the political risks emanating from the absence of a functioning model of autocratic popular citizenship consistent with regimes’ much slimmer commitments to providing jobs, welfare, subsidies and other public goods. Through an ethnography of Jordan’s regime-led Youth Empowerment Sector, I assess the effectiveness of entrepreneurialism as a post-welfare autocratic citizenship model. I begin by analyzing how youth are interpellated as market actors by pushing a definition of the entrepreneur that rests on a separation between the innovator and the possessor of capital; by promoting the illusion that youth already possess the means of production (in their phones and laptops); and by promoting a positive, moderately transgressive, go-getter attitude that obfuscates social and economic barriers to starting a business. I then argue, through a reading of Friedrich Hayek’s approach to justice, that the primary effect of entrepreneurialism is to bring forth a sense of procedural, market justice among Jordanian youth that destabilizes attachments to the social, substantive justice model that formed the basis of the old social contract. Whereas the exact effects of market justice on acquiescence to authoritarian power is difficult to measure, this paper sheds light on why autocrats are so invested in these practices, while contributing to understanding modes of individual endurance and hope in contemporary neoliberal autocracies.