Gifted education in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has developed significantly since its tentative beginnings in 1969. Increasingly, however, there are concerns that gifted education is not meeting its objectives. Based on the Ziegler-Balestrini-Stoegerian framework, we evaluate Saudi gifted education from a macro-systemic perspective, including the identification of the ten important exogenous and endogenous capitals and the six principles (law of the minimum, continuity, developmental level, support systems, control system and external management). Using information obtained from 25 source documents, we conduct an automated content analysis using Leximancer to find information related to each of the ten capitals and six principles. Our finding that the absence of a clearly articulated set of objectives and expected outcomes impact the system on many levels, and that, at best, Saudi gifted education is best described as a proto-system.