The desert winds drift over rows of giant foundation piles, each between 2.4 and 3 meters in diameter, half-buried under shifting sand. But these aren’t the ruins of an ancient civilization.

They are the remnants of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s dream: a futuristic city named Neom. The project was sold as an initiative to modernize Saudi Arabia — transforming it into a global tourism hub and financial center.

There is something almost mythological in bin Salman’s vision: a ruler standing in the desert, imagining a kingdom not built on oil wells, but on glass, steel, and reflection in the walls of a 500-meter-high megastructure called The Line, a horizontal 170-kilometer skyscraper inside Neom.

A sketch of The Line. Source: Neom

It reads less like urban planning and more like a reimagined tale from One Thousand and One Nights: a prince who sees himself as a modern Aladdin, snapping his fingers and expecting invisible forces — investors, engineers, global capital — to materialize his caprice on command.

He invited engineers from London and architects from Hollywood, according to Bloomberg — including the visual designer of I Am Legend, the production designer of Batman — as if fantasy aesthetics could conjure concrete reality.

What exactly did Salman promise?

A linear metropolis where carbon emissions are eliminated, and urban chaos is engineered out of existence. The proposition was radical: the city would host 9 million residents, without streets, without cars, where everything is five minutes away. Where high-speed trains cross the entire length in 20 minutes, omitting stops, boarding, or luggage.

When architects asked where suitcases would go, the answer was: leave them outside your door eight hours before your flight.

But the genies never quite arrived. Foreign investors, unlike in the folk tale, refused to rub the prince’s lamp.

Even on paper, the arithmetic strained credibility. Engineers quietly noted that travel-time calculations ignored stops. Architects struggled with basic questions — light, sewage, evacuation routes.

At one point, planners seriously proposed a floating “chandelier building” suspended above an artificial harbor, with waste collected by fleets of moving shuttles.

This was, by any measure, not innovation. It was architectural surrealism.

Over time, the projected costs ballooned from $500 billion to $1.5 trillion. The Wall Street Journal put the full Neom price tag by 2080 at an astronomical $8.8 trillion. An internal audit found “deliberate manipulation” of financial data — hotel rates artificially inflated from $489 to $1,866 per night — to mask the bleeding.

Logistically, the project was always a nightmare dressed as a dream. The nearest port is 80 kilometers away; to meet the 2030 deadline, a container of materials would have had to arrive every eight seconds. The “green” steel requirement would have consumed 60% of global annual production.

A single 800-meter module demanded 3.5 million tons of structural steel, 5.5 million cubic meters of concrete, 3.5 million tons of rebar — more cement annually than all of France produces.

When architects warned that a suspended “chandelier” building (30 stories, glass and steel) above an artificial harbor would sway and collapse, the executive director, Tarek Qaddumi, hand-waved: “Hundreds of shuttles will constantly drive under the building and collect waste.”

That’s not all. The harbor’s stagnant water would breed deadly bacteria unless giant pumps ran continuously from the Red Sea — a technological absurdity.

The construction site of Oxagon — part of Neom. Photo: Getty Images

Meanwhile, fundamental systems — water, waste, transport — had to be reinvented from scratch because the city’s linear form broke conventional urban logic. In emergencies, residents wouldn’t evacuate downward, but sideways.

A city designed to eliminate friction instead multiplied it.

One argument is even tragicomic: scientists warned that the 500‑meter wall would slice through bird migration routes. A designer dryly noted that if wind turbines don’t shred the birds, they’ll smash into the mirror facade at full speed. Alternatively, they could fly an additional 200 to 300 kilometers to circumvent The Line. Or die trying.

When the illusion began to crack, they cut down the ambition. But scaling back only made matters worse. Plans for unrealistic 20 modules shrank to three. A 10-mile phase became 1.5 miles. Population targets collapsed from 1.5 million to 300,000 by 2030. Even as expectations shrank, the cost per usable unit soared.

A bird view at the construction site of a fragment from The Line. Source: Neom

The true costs

Behind the spectacle lies a harsher story.

Entire communities, including the Huwaitat tribe, were forcibly displaced. At least 150 people arrested; one shot dead; three sentenced to death; 15 to up to 50 years in prison. Salma al-Shehab, a student who criticized the regime online, was slapped with a 34-year sentence (later reduced to four). After Jamal Khashoggi’s murder in October 2018, experts from MIT, Google, and Apple fled the advisory board — exactly one year after Neom was officially announced.

Meanwhile, international backlash after the murder of Jamal Khashoggi drove away prominent advisors and deepened investor unease.

The project, meant to symbolize a modernized Saudi Arabia, instead exposed the contradictions at its core: liberalization marketed outward, repression maintained inward.

Like any authoritarian regime, the Saudis turned to lies. Even as construction slowed — then effectively halted in large parts — official statements insisted that progress was accelerating. Press releases described momentum; satellite imagery showed stagnation. The Financial Times describes the site as “a desert littered with piles and excavation pits.”

Thousands of foundation piles now sit half-buried in sand. Excavations stretch across empty desert. Infrastructure built for plans that no longer exist remains stranded.

A poster from the Saudi press release about The Line. Source: Neom

And it’s hard not to draw a parallel between The Line and the Great Wall of China. Ultimately, this seems to be part of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s true plan: build a monument to himself that would shine brighter than the ancient Chinese wall.

In a sense, he has already succeeded — just not in the way intended. Whether completed or abandoned, Neom will remain linked forever with the name of Saudi Arabia’s most controversial ruler.

Neom stands as a lesson in what happens when power mistakes unchecked ambition for tough reality.