0:00 - NEOM promised a science fiction future, once envisioned to be the world's largest city by GDP. What you have today is a project that has collapsed in all its major elements. NEOM was the centerpiece of the ambitious plan to pivot Saudi Arabia away from oil. - Behind the scenes, the project's own staff were sounding the alarm. We've talked to numerous former employees, we've looked at satellite images, we've looked at internal financial documents. It's all to find out how and why the world's largest construction project has collapsed, and what is next for NEOM. The centerpiece of NEOM became The Line longer than the state of Connecticut.
0:46 It had over seven billion square feet. That is more than the combined square footage of every single building in New York City. It is a pair of twin skyscrapers, taller than the Empire State Building, that run continuously, except for a chunk where they tunnel through the mountains, and it would have nine million people. MBS wanted this to be like nothing the world had ever seen before. He'd repeatedly told his staff he wanted zero-gravity architecture, architecture that looks like you're in space where gravity doesn't apply. When I first saw it, my thought was, there is not enough money out there to do this. How on earth is this government going to fund this? Surely there was going to be a reckoning at some point.
1:33 Over the past nine months or so, that reckoning has arrived. What our reporting shows is that, construction on all the major projects has stopped or is winding down. We've talked to numerous former employees who have worked on the project, and the expectation by them and many others is that this project would be too costly to restart for any of the major elements. We reached out to NEOM for comment on the project's current development status, but we didn't get a response. Yasir Al-Rumayyan, the head of Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund, the sovereign wealth fund that controls NEOM, has said that no projects have been canceled at NEOM. Instead, he characterized it as a re-prioritization.
2:24 - It's good to have. It's not must-have. - It's difficult to get a really clear picture of internal finances at NEOM. The PIF annually publishes its financial statements, but it doesn't break out specifics for NEOM. What they showed us was some large hits, what you call impairments or write-downs on their capital projects, of which NEOM is the largest. They wrote off 46.8 billion Saudi Riyals in 2025 and 74.7 billion in 2024, and that's the equivalent of writing off 12 billion US dollars or 17 billion in 2024. What we understand from multiple people familiar with the matter is that, the country has spent well over $50 billion on NEOM now,
3:12 and will spend many billions more simply winding down the project. So, how did we get here? In the beginning to craft what NEOM would be, they assembled a roster of top Western consultants and came up with an enormous number of ideas. We got access to a 2000-plus page document that detailed all of these ideas. There's an artificial moon. There's written down an idea for Jurassic Park Theme Park. They also had plans to control the weather. So here is the artificial moon plan, and it calls for it to be the biggest installation in the world. They give an example of a potential partner as NASA.
3:59 The ideas from consultants became the blueprints for several key sub-projects. The biggest sub-project was The Line. You then had Trojena, which is a ski resort in an arid desert mountain where they would have snow three months of the year where snow only today falls in sprinklings and melts right away. There was Oxagon, which was supposed to be a advanced port city for logistics and modern manufacturing of all types. And then there was Sindalah, which is a high-end resort on an island aimed at the super yacht crowd. Early on to get this done, staff realized they had a mountain of concerns they were going to need to overcome. We got hold of a document
4:45 that outlines a huge number of the concerns, and it ranges from environmental to livability, to architecture, to buildability. And here's a key one, cost will be astronomical. For me, when I saw this, it told us that, there were people on the inside seeing what seemed so obvious from the outside, which is, this project was on a scale that couldn't be done. You can see in the latest satellite images that they actually had done a ton of work. In The Line you can see over the past few years, they took a chunk of 70 miles of land plus and dug a trench for what was supposed to be the trains and the infrastructure for The Line.
5:33 And then a thing they called the marina, which is this giant basin where yachts were supposed to come in and the first three chunks of The Line were gonna be built. They dug all the way down 150 feet below sea level and then started to put these massive concrete piles another 150 feet into the earth. And then late last year, that work just stopped. If you look down at Trojena, you can see this giant outline of where the lake was going to be. And there's even this weird structure that was going to be called the Enchanted Forest, which was going to be a forest beneath the lakes with a tunnel that connects to the land. And then at the very end of this lake is where they were spending all this money to build this dam that would just have enormous amounts of concrete and steel.
6:21 The Wall Street Journal acquired a set of videos from workers who were working on Trojena in its final days before it stopped. And you can see that the site was really far along and you can see the massive amount of steel that went into this ski village where there was supposed to be a ski slope. And then one day, these workers all were told the same thing, which is, "Construction has stopped. We're moving out." In Sindalah, you can see that an enormous amount of work had gotten completed and then simply stopped. The golf course, which was once green, that's gone brown. And you have another end of the island where simply work hasn't happened at all, but that was supposed to by now have a Four Seasons. A key point about NEOM is that it is MBS's project.
7:07 He is the developer and he's the bank. He's the chair of NEOM. He's the chair of all of the boards for the sub-projects within NEOM. He's chair of the public investment fund, which funds NEOM, and he runs the country. This structure fed into everything at NEOM and led to a lot of problems. We reviewed a draft internal audit of the project that found a conscious manipulation of financials of NEOM by staff. This was common according to former employees that we spoke to. We reviewed the financials of Trojena from a 2023 document to the Trojena board. And what it showed was that the project costs were ballooning and had hit $39 billion.
7:53 This was a problem because the Crown Prince wanted all the projects to be profitable. So when project staff made proposals and came up with renderings, they needed to show that a project would actually, over time, pay back to the Saudi state. What did staff do? So we can see in this presentation that, to adjust for the rising costs, they also increased the expected revenue that they were going to be getting from all of the things at the project. An inventive glamping site was envisioning that it would get $216 a night. They adjusted it to $704 a night. Suddenly, hotels would be much more profitable, even though no conditions on the ground had changed from one month to another. This was just one little piece of NEOM,
8:40 but it had big implications for what was going on throughout the project. NEOM was described as a $500-billion project initially, but a draft board presentation reviewed by the Wall Street Journal showed that the capital required to build out NEOM to its end state by 2080 was $8.8 trillion. That is more than 25 times Saudi's annual budget at the time for the whole country. A NEOM spokesperson said at the time that the journal was incorrectly interpreting and misrepresenting the figures, but declined to provide additional detail. What we have heard out of NEOM is that they are focused on Oxagon.
9:43 - Starting late last year, NEOM began canceling the contracts of many of the projects that were underway. In recent months, we've started to see public acknowledgement of that. CEOs have been talking on conference calls about how their work at NEOM is over. - The project like NEOM is now in the doldrums and is not happening anymore. - The two NEOM contracts in Saudi Arabia were canceled. - The basic structural problem at NEOM was what we've referred to in the past as a dance of mutual delusion. It was a project where truth simply couldn't be told. MBS had fantastical views of what NEOM should be, but the people around him
10:28 wouldn't tell him it was impossible. It's a tale of many things, a tale of Icarus, a tale of the emperor's new clothes, where the fantastical visions of the Crown Prince collided with the financial reality.
