In 2017, Saudi Arabia’s ambitious, young leader, Mohammed bin Salman, unveiled Neom: a futuristic new city Saudi Arabia would build in the desert. Neom would be a hotspot for tourism like the French Riviera, a center of innovation like Silicon Valley, and a global melting pot like Dubai. It would help transform the Saudi economy. But over the years, that already bold plan grew even more ambitious. In the first of two episodes about Neom, WSJ’s Rory Jones and Eliot Brown explain how an effort to pivot the Saudi economy away from oil grew to encompass plans for a desert ski resort and skyscrapers the length of Connecticut. Plus we hear from two people who uprooted their lives and moved to Neom to help make MBS’s dream a reality. Hosted by Ryan Knutson. Sign up for WSJ’s free What’s News newsletter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Chapter 1: What is Neom and why was it announced in 2017?
It was 2017 in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. Inside the conference hall of a splashy hotel, Fox business host Maria Bartiromo was kicking off Saudi Arabia's big investor conference, sometimes called Davos in the Desert. Gathered beneath glittering chandeliers were the movers and shakers of the business world. They were there to witness a historic announcement.
Please welcome to the stage, ladies and gentlemen, His Royal Highness, Prince Mohammed bin Salman.
Addressing his audience in Arabic, Saudi Arabia's young leader, MBS as he's known, unveiled plans for a place he called Neom.
We have Neom for us.
Neom was a futuristic new city that Saudi Arabia would build from scratch in the middle of the desert. A flashy video drove the idea home.
Here we see the birth of Neom, the world's most ambitious project, a destination of the future, a vision that is becoming reality. We see a chance to design a better way of life with a blueprint for sustainable living.
There's this big video of what the northwest of his country is going to look like, and he's going to build Neom there, and it's going to be this futuristic city.
My colleague Rory Jones covers the Middle East. He remembers this announcement and what happened next.
MBS pulls out two phones. One is like the, I think it's like a Nokia 6210 or something, you know, we all had in the 90s or 2000s. Like the one you can play Snake on or whatever, right? That's exactly right, yeah. And he pulls out an iPhone, smartphone, and he says, you know, he compares Neom and the Kingdom with the technological leap of those two phones.
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Chapter 2: Who is Mohammed bin Salman and what is his vision for Neom?
MBS's message? With Neom, he was going to transform cities, the same way Apple transformed phones.
MBS wanted to create this place that was going to be a mix of the French Riviera, where people would go on vacation there, and it was going to have touches of Silicon Valley. Companies are going to want to set up there and create businesses of the future. And then it was going to have splashes of Dubai, where is this sort of melting pot of different cultures.
And so, yeah, I remember hearing about Neom and thinking, wow, like this is like a huge, huge change. But I also remember thinking, like, I'm not quite sure what this is.
Rory had questions. What exactly was NEOM going to be? Who would build it and how quickly? Could Saudi Arabia and MBS actually pull this off? So he and a team of Wall Street Journal reporters started digging. Over the past seven years, they've talked to dozens of people who moved to the Saudi desert to work on NEOM. and they've poured over thousands of pages of internal documents.
What do you find most interesting about the NEOM story?
I find everything interesting about the NEOM story. It's the ambition. Like, it is a very, very ambitious project. It's one of the world's most ambitious projects. It is currently the world's biggest construction project. And so, you know, you could throw as many superlatives at it as you want, but it's a big deal.
But their reporting shows that the project is years behind schedule and projected to be trillions of dollars over budget. And MBS's dream of a desert utopia is looking more like a nightmare. Welcome to The Journal, our show about money, business, and power. I'm Ryan Knudsen. It's Friday, April 25th. Over the next two episodes, we'll be telling the story of Neon.
This is part one, skiing in the desert. We asked for an interview with a NEOM representative for this podcast, but NEOM declined. In a statement, a NEOM spokeswoman said the project had started the year on, quote, a positive footing. She noted that like any large project, NEOM continues to make changes to ensure its long-term success.
She also said that NEOM is, quote, unprecedented in terms of ambition and scale. This is how NEOM supporters have often described it, as a breathtakingly ambitious, even utopian project. NEOM would be the next stage of human development, an experiment in a better way of living. But NEOM was also supposed to be something else, a practical solution to some of the kingdom's most pressing problems.
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Chapter 3: What economic and social challenges is Saudi Arabia facing?
Here's MBS in a Discovery Channel documentary talking about the genesis of NEOM. Northwest of Saudi Arabia, untouched, almost empty.
It has a mix of topography, mountains, valleys, oasis, dunes, beaches, islands, corals, from skiing to diving.
That's the place. And he understands that it has a lot of the natural ingredients to make a new, exciting city-state within his kingdom.
The area MBS was planning to develop was huge, roughly the size of Massachusetts. And it wasn't a completely blank slate. There were villages there, and native tribes who'd been calling the area home for generations. They'd need to be relocated, by force if necessary. But for an authoritarian ruler like MBS, that didn't present much of an impediment.
No, this area was a place where he could enact the radical changes the rest of Saudi Arabia wasn't ready for. In Neom, foreigners would be welcome. It would have its own business-friendly legal system. It would be a home for new industries, tourism, media, biotech, clean energy that could help diversify the Saudi economy. And it would be more socially liberal.
Women could wear bikinis at the beach. There were even discussions about allowing alcohol. And so, MBS went to the people you go to to turn lofty, fantastical visions into reality. Management consultants.
Neon brought in McKinsey, Boston Consulting Group, Oliver Wyman, like a who's who of the management consulting world. Part of the reason he turns to management consultants is because there wasn't a lot of expertise in particular industries that he wanted to create at Neon. There wasn't really a tourism industry. There wasn't a tech industry.
And so he needs outside expertise to try to help him deliver on this vision. And what these management consultants do is they put all their ideas together down in more than like 2,000 pages of planning documents for what Neon might look like.
More than 2,000 pages?
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Chapter 4: Why was the northwest region of Saudi Arabia chosen for Neom?
Some of the wildest ideas came from MBS himself.
These documents show how he, in board meetings, is like putting forward ideas for what he wants. You know, he wants a beach that will glow like your watch glows in the dark. And he's also keen on this idea of a moon that can rise with drones every night at NEOM and become this sort of showpiece. This sounds like Las Vegas on acid. That is a great way of describing it. Yeah, yeah.
In the end, the plans for Neom roughly coalesced around five key developments, each with an appropriately dramatic name. There was Magna, Neom's string of luxury beachfront hotels, Syndala, an island with a cluster of resorts, Oxagon, a port on the Red Sea, Trojena, a mountain resort, and then there was Neom's centerpiece, the actual city part of this futuristic city-state. It was called The Line.
This is a wild idea.
My colleague Elliot Brown spent years covering real estate. The line is unlike any building he's ever seen, or even ever dreamed about, for that matter.
At its full vision, it's absolutely enormous. If you just look at the square footage as envisioned, it would have more square footage than all of New York City.
The line is a skyscraper, or rather two skyscrapers running parallel to each other. Each tower would stretch 1,600 feet into the air, taller than the Empire State Building, and also run for 106 miles, roughly the length of Connecticut. Yes, that is two skyscrapers, side by side, running for 106 miles. In pictures, it's undeniably striking. Breathtaking, almost.
The outside of the building would be covered with mirrored glass so that it reflects the desert landscape, blurring the line where the structure ends and nature begins. The entire complex would house around 9 million people. But people would live inside of it.
Like, you wouldn't have open air. The middle would essentially be a giant atrium. Some people get a window view looking out. Other people get a window view looking in. And then there's this essentially 600-foot space between the buildings where sometimes it's open air, sometimes it's parks sort of spliced between these buildings.
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Chapter 5: How are consultants shaping the ambitious plans for Neom?
That's because MBS is both the developer and the bank. MBS is the chair of Neom's board, in addition to being the chair of every subproject within Neom. He's also the chair of Neom's main funder, Saudi Arabia's sovereign wealth fund, home to about a trillion dollars of the country's oil wealth. If MBS wanted the line, he was in a good position to get it.
The Saudi government and the Saudi wealth fund did not respond to requests for comment. Why does MBS need the line? Why not just build a fancy yet achievable city?
Yeah, it's a good question. I think it's early on in the planning of NEOM, in a meeting MBS goes to his urban planners, I want to build my pyramids. He's essentially thinking about NEOM in the context of the pyramids of Giza, which have been around for thousands of years. He wants to make that kind of physical mark on the land
So then it's not just about changing Saudi Arabia or even reinventing the idea of a city. It's also about...
Yeah, I think that's absolutely right. MBS does want to create this city-state that drives economic change and reform in his kingdom and that allows the kingdom to diversify away from oil. But at the same time, he wants to make his mark and he wants to do that in a very, very eye-catching kind of way.
MBS was aware that his plans for Neom and Saudi Arabia were ambitious. He's often said that achieving even half of his ambitions would be a win and transformative for his country. But to achieve even a small percentage of the Neom vision would require a massive effort and huge numbers of people willing to move to a remote corner of the desert to make it all real. That's coming up.
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Beginning around 2020, hundreds and then thousands of people packed up their lives and moved to the Saudi desert to deliver Neom, MBS's dream. One of them was Andy.
My name's Andy Wirth.
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Chapter 6: What are the key components of Neom's development plan?
And yeah, I love skiing. I love snowboarding, alpine skiing, backcountry skiing, Nordic skiing, skate skiing. Quite honestly, Ryan, I've never met a mountain, a horse, a dog, or a pair of skis I didn't like.
Andy will tell you he's been very fortunate in his career. He's made enough money to only take on projects he really cares about. And in early 2020, he heard about one that seemed to fit that bill.
Out of the clear blue sky, as Forrest Gump would say, I got this note over LinkedIn, I think it was, indicating there was some interest in having me come over to Saudi Arabia to work on this project called NEOM.
What was NEOM as you understood it from this initial pitch?
Chapter 7: What is 'The Line' and why is it considered a revolutionary urban design?
It was an effort to make more progressive the country, usher in a new era, if you will, for that country. I'm not too sure if there's any slogans like make Saudi Arabia great again, but nonetheless, it was part of the vision that he had as the leader for that country to do many things in northwest Saudi Arabia.
Among the things MBS wanted to do was develop Neom's Rocky Red Mountains. He and his advisors envisioned a luxury mountain destination with hiking, mountain biking, and yes, skiing. Neom wanted to hire Andy to lead the mountain project and develop Saudi Arabia's very first world-class ski resort. What was the issue that first came to your mind? Well, snow, natural snowfall.
It might surprise you to learn that the Saudi mountains do get a dusting of snow in the winter. Not enough to ski on by a long shot. But to Andy, that wasn't a deal breaker.
It didn't deter me. It was really intriguing at a, call it a strategic level. But skiing wasn't what convinced Andy to sign on to Neom. Honestly, the intrigue of resort development was a bit of a shoulder shrug for me.
What was a primary interest and what was really driving me was having Saudi Arabia, oil producing country for generations, fund what was ultimately a really remarkable project to demonstrate the value impact of doing now what we should have been doing a generation or two ago on the fight against climate change.
That's because NEOM aimed to be a 100% renewable energy project.
And there was a poetic irony in that Saudi Arabia, world's greatest producer of oil for generations, that was going to fund this.
One of MBS's goals is to pivot the country away from oil. NEOM would be part of that. The project would be powered by wind and solar. It would pioneer green hydrogen production. And it would do so on a massive scale. Andy hoped it would be a proof of concept for the world.
So I actually was digging on the contrarian nature of things. Counterintuitive, isn't it?
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Chapter 8: Why does Mohammed bin Salman want to build 'The Line' and what does it symbolize?
How much money? The normal rule of thumb was take your highest paying job and add 30% to that.
Tony signed on to help run Neom's education sector. His wife, who's also an educator, joined Neom, too. Soon, they were on a plane headed to Saudi Arabia. They even took their yellow lab, Tanner. They flew to Riyadh, then to Tabuk, before making the two-hour drive to Neom. And what's a drive like?
What do you see out the window? So I don't know when the last time you were in Utah, but it's a little bit like that. It's a desert, not the sort of Lawrence of Arabia desert, but the sort of gravelly stone desert. It's quite mountainous, quite hilly. It's a scrabby place. You don't want to get out of the car. And then you arrive at the camp, and the very, very first thing that strikes you
is it really does look like a forward military base.
The camp was encircled by high-security fencing. Inside were row upon row of identical white cabins. They kind of looked like mobile homes. This is where Neom's white-collar workers lived.
And then the other facilities, there was a big communal dining hall. There was a swimming pool, a little gym. There was a small shop. a barber, just enough to sort of keep you going.
There was also another population of foreign workers at Neom, the laborers who would actually be building this new city. They were mostly from South Asia, and Tony and Andy didn't see much of them. They lived in separate, even more cramped camps. At NEOM, Tony hit the ground running.
There was so much pressure to answer some basic questions, I soon found myself rolling up my sleeves and just putting out fires.
What curriculum should they use? How many teachers should they hire? Neom's consultants had gotten a head start on some of those questions, like figuring out how big Neom's student population would be. But Tony didn't find much use for their work.
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