This study examines the impact of dictators' characteristics on FDI. We test the hypothesis that foreign investors scrutinize public information on leaders to assess the risk of expropriation in dictatorships. In particular, we assume they use three suitable dictators' characteristics: education level, education in economics and management, and prior experience in business. We perform fixed effects estimations to explain FDI inflows on an unbalanced panel of 100 dictatorial countries from 1973 to 2008. We find that educated dictators, dictators with education in economics and business experience are more attractive to foreign investors. Our results are robust to several tests and checks, notably when we compare them to counterfactual democratic nations.