--:-- Ryan Knudsen: Welcome to The Journal, our show about money, business, and power. I'm Ryan Knudsen. It's Saturday, April 26th. This episode is the second in our two-part deep dive into Neon. Today's episode, The Emperor's New Clothes.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: Tony Harris, the education expert you heard from in the last episode, was just a few months into his job at NEOM when he got his first real impression of the project's CEO, Nadmi Al-Nassar. He called all of us together. And at that point, I think there were about between 400 and 500 people at the camp at that time. The denizens of Neom piled into the camp's cafeteria. Saudis, expats. He called everyone together, and he literally started screaming and shouting. It was as though your four-year-old was having a tantrum on the floor. What was he saying when he was yelling? He was admonishing people for not working hard enough, essentially was his message.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: And what was going through my mind was this can't actually be happening and I thought to myself okay very soon what's going to happen he's going to stop his performing and somebody's going to come in and there's going to be some interesting intervention and there's going to be a there's going to be some little lesson about how not to manage but oh no this was for real this was for I was shocked. I mean, you know, I have lived all over the world. I've taught all over the world. I've encountered people from different cultures. I've never seen anything like this.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: Like, he is a doer who is going to execute and he's going to bludgeon his way through whatever project he's working on and he's going to get it finished on budget and on time. And this is the kind of guy that MBS brings into the project pretty early on. Mohammed bin Salman, Saudi Arabia's crown prince, was on a mission to construct what amounted to a brand new futuristic city-state within his country. Neom was his vision, his baby. But every visionary needs a right-hand man. MBS's was Nodmi.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: Nodmi, everyone we talked to called him by his first name, became Neom's CEO in 2018. He's an engineer by training, with round glasses and a trim salt-and-pepper mustache. He came to the CEO job with a track record of delivering on big projects. He'd expanded Saudi Arabia's biggest oil field in the 90s and built a new university complex on the Red Sea. And according to Rory's reporting, he made no apologies for his, let's call it aggressive management style.
--:-- Rory Jones: We heard this recording of Nadmi describing how he runs projects. And he says, I drive my people like slaves. That's how I get my projects done. I drive everybody like a slave. And when they drop down dead, I celebrate. That's me. When they drop down dead, I celebrate, said Nadmi in a private meeting.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: We reached out to him for an interview, but he didn't respond. People like Tony and Andy, the ski executive, had moved thousands of miles from home to the middle of the desert to help build Neom. But they were quickly realizing that there was something strange about this place. It wasn't just the project's screaming CEO. Neom was also bleeding money. Dysfunction reigned. And very little was actually being built.
--:-- Tony Harris: It was in the neighborhood of maybe a month and a half, two months. That quickly? Oh, yeah. And that's, I'm actually probably being generous. I think that honeymoon period lasted for probably a month or so. And then we started asking questions.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: Welcome to The Journal, our show about money, business, and power. I'm Ryan Knudsen. It's Saturday, April 26th. This episode is the second in our two-part deep dive into Neon. Today's episode, The Emperor's New Clothes.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: To Tony, one of the most surprising things about NEOM was how people approached spending. One of the things that emerged, which I found absolutely fascinating, was one of the most important metrics NEOM uses to evaluate projects is the speed at which you spend money. Now, just let that sink in a little bit. The speed at which you spend money. It's not about how effective was the project, how many people did it reach, how many lives did it change. No, it's about how quickly you spend money.
--:-- Tony Harris: Were you spending enough money? No, we couldn't spend money quickly enough. We could not spend money quickly enough.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: Tony recalls one project he worked on, a hackathon and online leadership program for kids. The idea was to promote Neom's education efforts. There really weren't any kids at Neom yet, since it was still most of the construction site. So the leadership program was online. And when Tony learned how much he'd been authorized to spend on it, he was flabbergasted. Half a million dollars. In my world, it would have been about 10% of that. $50,000.
--:-- Tony Harris: Yes, instead of 10 times that. So, you know, I went with the flow, believe me. Did you spend half a million dollars? Yes. And look, it was a successful project, as it should have been. Half a million dollars for some online webinars.
--:-- Andy Wirth: It was, gosh, a couple months into it, we had these, I think, there's something like a town hall meeting. As Andy remembers it, Nodmi had called all of Neom's sector heads together. Andy, plus the heads of the sports sector, the health sector, biotech, energy. Nodmi's message? It was, if each of the sector heads don't spend the money that was allocated in this quote-unquote fiscal year, it'll be brought before the founding board to explain why. And for this fiscal year, calendar year, I think I was supposed to have spent $600 or $700 million.
--:-- Andy Wirth: $600 or $700 million. Andy says he'd only managed to spend $200 or $300,000. And I can feasibly conceive of a way to expend that sum of money between July and the end of that year. Why did they want you to spend so much money? Oh, you know, even in our country, you have the government approach to, if you don't, you know, spend it or lose it. But it was, I think it was honestly an embarrassment to nod me. It was an expression of progress to have expended these funds. And therefore, if they weren't expended, that would be a very direct indication of a lack of progress.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: Money's being spent, and therefore we are working. Yes. That's right. What were you spending money on in the time that you were there? Consultants and master planners and subcontractors to feed the master planning process.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: In 2024, Neom would conduct an internal audit, and the auditors would call out this culture of spending. They described Neom's CEO, Nodmi, as having a, quote, spend-the-budget strategy. But very little of that budget was actually going to build stuff. Instead, it was going to consultants. Remember, consultants had played a key role in the early days, coming up with ideas for Neom. But years into the project, Neom had its own staff of experts, people like Tony and Andy. And still, Neom's executives leaned heavily on consultants.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: According to people familiar with Neom's spending, in a single year, Neom paid McKinsey $130 million. And Price Waterhouse Cooper's $260 million.
--:-- Tony Harris: They didn't want us to make any decisions. What they did want us to do was to hire one of the aforementioned consulting companies to research the issue and make a recommendation. Why? Very, very curious. Now, I thought about that myself. One reason Tony eventually concluded was that it was a way for Neom's bosses to protect themselves. If the project fails or there's a problem, I can always turn around and say look it not me. We paid these guys and their associates. Don't blame me.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: Nobody ever wants to take responsibility. And one understands why not. Because the system of management over there is ruthless. And so people are afraid to make decisions. Make a mistake, and you might just find yourself being berated by Nodmi. According to people who worked with him, Nodmi once told an executive in a meeting to walk out into the desert and die so that he could urinate on his grave. Another time, after a deal fell through, he gathered his staff and demanded to know why he hadn't been given a heads up. He said, quote, if you don't tell me who is responsible, I'm going to take a gun from under my desk and shoot you.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: This is according to people with knowledge in the meeting. It was full-on, the shining, Jack Nicholson-type stuff. As one of Nodmi's direct reports, Andy says he both witnessed and was on the receiving end of the CEO's wrath.
--:-- Andy Wirth: I never even conceived of somebody in a leadership role having this disposition. I didn't think it would actually ever exist. I never thought I'd actually see it. What impact do you think that his style had on the overall project and the people who work there?
--:-- Andy Wirth: The impact it had on everybody in the organization was one of constant fear. Constantly, anywhere near his presence, walking on eggshells and or ice. You just didn't know if it was going to break through and he was going to lose his s**t.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: Neom says employee welfare is a top priority and that workers are encouraged to anonymously voice concerns. A spokeswoman also said the project has a, quote, robust governance framework, unquote, and takes expert advice into consideration when making decisions.
--:-- Andy Wirth: Neom Mountain was getting more expensive. It's a trend that would continue long after Andy left the project. Reporter Elliot Brown saw some internal Neom documents from 2023. By this time, Neom Mountain had been renamed Trojena. So in 2021, the documents estimate that Trojena was going to cost about $18 billion, and then by 2022, it's jumped up to $27 billion. And then by 2023, toward the end of the year when this presentation's from, it is $39 billion.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: And this was happening at projects all across NEOM. But as NEOM's costs ballooned, it didn't seem to change the project's course. That 2024 audit NEOM conducted suggests one reason why. Elliott got a look at a version of that audit. It was labeled Final Draft. And it's pretty damning.
--:-- Elliott Brown: According to NEOM's auditors and Elliott's own reporting, as costs rose, rather than push for cutbacks to NEOM, executives sometimes just fudge the numbers. So there was this measure that the crown prince really cared about. It's called IRR, or Internal Rate of Return, that's very commonly used by real estate developers and private equity. IRRs are basically the percentage of a project's costs that come back to you every year as profit.
--:-- Elliott Brown: Now, a lot of what Saudi Arabia was spending on at Neom wasn't supposed to make money. It was infrastructure, stuff like roads and utilities. But other stuff definitely was supposed to be profitable, like the hotels or the apartments they were going to sell on the line. They wanted to have these buildings make money, so they said everything needs to get, you know, around 9% IRR.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: As Neom's costs grew, Elliott's reporting shows that executives manipulated the IRRs to keep them around that 9% sweet spot. So you can see this with Trojana. In this fall 2023 document we have, you can see that they had a glamping site. Glamping, like this is sort of, you know, what do they call it, glamorous camping, like sort of fancy tents? Yeah, and they originally were estimating that they'd get $216 a night. Well, after costs went up, they looked at it closer and said, well, actually, we were readjusting that to $704 a night.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: $704 a night for glamping. Must be really glammed up. A boutique hiking hotel. The rooms were originally targeted for $489 a night. And, you know, then they said, actually, we're going to get $1,866 a night. It fixed the problem because the costs had hurt the IRR, and it was down to 7%. And then they added the changes to the hotel rooms, and it brought them up to 9.3%.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: How widespread was this practice? It was common. We've talked to a lot of people who took part in it. Manipulating the IRRs meant that Neom's executives didn't have to confront their higher-ups, MBS in particular, with the realities of cost. An added dollar of projected cost could just be balanced out by another dollar of expected profit. They could keep the Neom dream going, buoyed by fuzzy math.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: Elliott says it's an arrangement that seemed to suit both MBS and the people working for him. We call it a mutual dance of delusion. The crown prince would go to the people running Neom and say, I want completely crazy architecture that defies what we know about how buildings are built, as though it could sort of get done realistically. And then they would, you know, according to this audit and, you know, the former employees we talked to, essentially delude him with how well it was looking on paper.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: Elliot calls it a mutual dance of delusion. Tony Harris has another term for it. The emperor has no clothes. To Tony, MBS was the emperor in the fable, parading around in the nude while his advisors complimented him on his new suit. And nowhere was this dynamic more evident than with the line, MBS's plan for those massive parallel skyscrapers running 106 miles into the desert.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: Come on, nobody's going to live in a structure like that. When you're inside there, it's going to have the atmosphere of an airport terminal or a shopping mall. Tony didn't work on the line, but the schools he was building were supposed to be housed in it. From the beginning, people at NEOM had concerns about the line. You get a flavor of them in an internal document Rory and Elliot saw. They collected staff feedback on the design after MBS first proposed it.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: At the end of the document, they have 20 pages of comments sort of highlighting risks and concerns. A lot of the comments were bordering on disbelief, essentially. One of them I remember was like, cost will be astronomical. Will mean Neom will need to absorb significant building infrastructure costs as sunk investment to attract investment. Another one was like, we're letting design lead use. Use will usually drive design. We are using design to drive use.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: People are saying, we're really not building something here that people are one of going to live and work in were really letting our imagination drive the thinking here. People also singled out practical issues. The line would negatively affect Neom's wind farm. Because the height and continuous nature of the line will create windshade when wind comes from the north or south. Many, many birds would die.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: The large mirrored surface of the walls of the structure would likely cause extensive losses in bird populations due to bird strikes. So were there concerns? There were an enormous number of concerns. The question is more how deeply did those get voiced at the top.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: According to Rory and Elliot's reporting, the answer is not so much. Instead, MBS's executives shielded him from the full scope of NEOM's challenges and costs. To Tony, it was baffling. Right in front of us is this craziness. If someone would just say to him, it's not a good idea to build a middle school 300 meters up in the sky in a glass tunnel in the middle of the desert. That doesn't sound like a great idea, does it?
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: Did you have an urge or any ability to be the one to say that? The urges were always there. But if you wanted your job, I mean, they brooked absolutely no dissension. Zero. The slightest wavering, the slightest sign of resistance, you were out on your ear. And that was made very, very clear.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: How did they make it clear that you'd be sort of fired if there was any dissent? By witnessing people who were fired? Elliott and Roy's reporting confirms that employees were often fired for challenging higher-ups on Neom's costs and feasibility.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: A Neom spokeswoman said that Neom, quote, champions excellence, professionalism, diversity, and ethical conduct, end quote, and requires staff to uphold those values. Did anybody around MBS play the role of bad cop? To the best of my knowledge, no.
--:-- Andy Wirth: So that must have been a strange position for you to be in working in this. Like your job is to build out this resort. But like it's only a few months in where you're starting to see, well, this isn't possible. Yeah, they're not plausible. They're not possible. They're lunacy and more.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: But so what do you do as an executive who has a history of getting things done in an environment where you don't think the goals are achievable? Try and change it. Did you try to change it? Yes.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: How that went is after the break. One of Andy's favorite things to do at NEOM was go hiking up in the mountains. I just love getting into the backcountry. And I did that many times alone, just solo hiking back there. Sometimes he'd camp overnight.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: One of his favorite spots was a literal oasis, with palm trees jutting out of the desert rock. The hikes irked his boss, Nodmi. I got in so much trouble with Nodmi, which I didn't care at all about him and getting in trouble with him. It was something I found great pleasure in, actually, by the time I left.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: Andy was quickly souring on Neom. The plans for Neom Mountain just didn't make sense to him. And he was increasingly worried about their impact on Neom's pristine mountains. These areas, Ryan, are beautiful. They are absolutely gorgeous and beautiful.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: And, you know, if you go to parts of Arizona and you see high mountain desert and you see the mountainous areas, whether they be Red Rock or other, they're still starkly beautiful. This area is beautiful. If you and I had gone to Moab, Utah in the 30s before mountain-cut bikes were even conceived of, this is what that was like.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: It was warm because it was June, July, August. I didn't mind that. But it was intriguing. I thought it was beautiful. And to go in there and to destroy it made no sense. And frankly, quickly became quite angered about the whole deal.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: Andy spent much of his career running ski resorts. So he's definitely not the kind of environmentalist who wants to shut people out of nature. He wants them in it. But not at the expense of destroying a place. He believes development can and should be balanced with conservation.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: And he was not seeing that balance at Neomountain. Not only was it creative stupid, it was creative destructively. What was the thing that would have destroyed it the most? Of the top 10, vault number one, the lake number two, number three, some of the other smaller, if you will, developments, the hospitality properties.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: It's so much in the way of high explosives and destruction of a landscape that it's hard to even conceive of. And then Andy learned that MBS himself knew these mountains. I found out from some of the folks close to the royal family that the crown prince had spent many of his formative years around this area.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: And so I started developing an appeal to him directly, to MBS, to shut down some of these things that were just lunatic. And appeal to his direct sensibilities on this and maybe a place that had fond childhood memories. So I started crafting a message to go directly to him, to Mohammed bin Salman.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: Andy's proposal was essentially to throw out the master plan for Neom Mountain. There would be no vault, no lake. Instead, they'd play up the natural beauty of what they had. The plan would be much cheaper and, in Andy's view, still achieve Neom's goals.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: He began developing his pitch in secret. And then he says Nodmi got wind of it. Word got out, and he absolutely, bleeding from his eyeballs, screaming. At you. Oh, yeah. To your face. Yeah, which happened all the time with me, and it didn't matter to me.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: I made the mistake of laughing at him a couple times because he was actually funny to watch doing this kind of in his mode. But yeah, it drove him batshit crazy when I advanced that thought. Because there was just no way I could get this two-page document rationalizing a different approach to the mountain region.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: I could not get that to the Crown Prince without going through Nodmi's desk. Andy had known from his earliest days on the job that the plans for Neo Mountain were ambitious, but he'd hoped he'd be able to change things on the ground.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: So you sort of thought going into it, like, okay, even the sort of crazy ideas you heard about, you thought, well, I get in there, we'll steer this in the right direction. Being CEO of this region, yeah, I saw myself as with science, math, modeling, good sense, and more. Some of my experiences injected into this effort to be able to change a little bit of direction.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: If not a little bit, change the directions of some of them, some of the elements within Neon Mountain. And you found you weren't able to do that? Not at all. In fact, it was exact opposite. Shut up. Execute. Rationalize. Execute.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: All of this made him think about something some of his colleagues told him, a couple months into the job. They'd say, Andy, haven't you heard? You carry two buckets over here. One's filled with gold and one's filled with horse s***. It's only when the horse s*** outweighs the gold that you reconsider working here.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: And I was indifferent about the money, the gold. I was indifferent. But the horse s*** piled up pretty quickly in my bucket. Andy left Neom in September of 2020. He just got on a plane. He didn't tell Nadmi he was quitting until he was out of the country. He lasted five months.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: Tony lasted a bit longer. The illicit wine might have helped. So as you know, Saudi Arabia is totally dry. And so in theory was the camp. But we found a way of doctoring the fruit juice.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: By like letting it ferment or something? Yes, we brought in some stuff that would make it work. And by the way, they sold these, I mean, you can only laugh because they must have known what we were doing. They sold these big cardboard cartons of fruit juice in the camp store. And, you know, people would cart them away in wheelbarrows.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: What would you talk about over the moonshine with your friends? How nuts we all are. But, you know, we were there. And, you know, it's not often that you're able to walk into a car dealership and write a check with one month's salary for a brand new vehicle. That is very seductive.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: So it was the money that was keeping you going. It was certainly the money that was keeping us going towards the end, yes. Absolutely. Yes. Yes. For Tony, the bucket of gold still outweighed that second bucket, at least for a time. And that wasn't just true for him.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: Another former Neom employee told Elliot, people are there, quote, for the income, not the outcome. I mean, I think the number of people who we met who were building a second house on Ibiza, or somebody was paying for a nice 40-foot Hinkley, or somebody was waiting until they'd paid off their kids' college tuition, I think you get the drift.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: You know, this was the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, which comes along once in a blue moon. And for many people it never comes along. What else other than the money was keeping you going? Well I think we wanted to stick it out.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: We said we come this far. Maybe it's going to get better. You know, maybe they will see the reason. Maybe this is not so bad. But eventually, it became too stressful. And I think that's why we left, and I think that's why most people leave.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: Just, they can't take the work environment. Tony and his wife left Neom in May 2021. They'd lasted a year. If I look back today, I certainly don't regret that experience. We learned a lot. We met some absolutely fabulous people. So I'm not sorry that we had that experience.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: I just am sorry that it was so badly led from the very top. Nodmi would last another three years at Neom. And the story of his departure starts with what should have been a major moment for the project. The grand opening of its very first development, Sindala, that island with a cluster of resorts and parking for your yacht.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: It was, by Neom standards, easy to build. Reporter Elliot Brown again. You know, in reality, it's challenging to build on an island, and it was sort of innovative design. But compared to the line, you know, we're talking structures that are a few stories high. It was supposed to cost a little over a billion dollars as of a couple years ago.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: But as they actually got along with construction, everything just kept going up. The concrete was expensive. The steel was expensive. Everything was taking a while. Sindala was running three years late and $3 billion over budget.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: The pressure was growing for Nodmi to finally deliver. And so, in October, he launched Sindala with a big, glitzy party. Will Smith and Tom Brady attended. Alicia Keys performed for an audience of business executives. Superyachts floated in the water nearby.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: But the spectacle couldn't entirely distract from the embarrassing truth about Zendala. The reality is it wasn't even done. Half of the island is still a construction site. The hotels that were theoretically done are a lot of the rooms are shut.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: And still more damning was who hadn't shown up for the launch. What did MBS make of this? Well, he didn't go to the party. MBS had stood up Neom and Nadmi. We don't know why, but the Neom employees were quite surprised by that.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: They took it as a sign of disapproval. And then three weeks later, Saudi decides to shake up Neom. Within weeks, Nadmi leaves as the CEO. Reporter Rory Jones again. The sort of exact details about what happened and why and whether he was pushed isn't clear.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: But what is clear is that there is this coming out party for Neom that MBS doesn't turn up at. And then weeks later, the CEO of Neom is gone. Nadmi had presided over years of ballooning costs, staff churn, and push deadlines. The dance of delusion had thrived on his watch.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: But when the time came to deliver, the music stopped. And Nodmi, the man who once declared that he drives people like slaves, was out. There are many stories of visionary CEOs who drive their employees incredibly hard and get miracles out of them. So why don't you think it worked for Nodmi?
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: Yeah, it's a good question. I think partly it's about the juxtaposition between that sort of culture of the hard-charging exec and the idea for Neom. Neom is supposed to be this place where people go and they're free-thinking. The whole essence of Neom is it's going to be more liberal than the rest of the kingdom and it's going to be progressive.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: And a lot of the people that go there are buying into that idea and they really do think of themselves as interested in creating the future. So you've got these types of people that are then coming into contact with a CEO that is more in a traditional mold, that believes that he can sort of shout and belittle people, and that's going to motivate them.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: And there's just a complete culture clash there. Since Nadmi's departure, Saudi Arabia's sovereign wealth fund, the PIF, has taken more direct control of Neom. And they're finally coming to grips with the project's true cost.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: We saw one document that was a draft presentation to the board last year that put the total capital expenditure of the full Neom buildout at $8.8 trillion. $8 trillion. I mean, I feel like I already know the answer to this question, but can Saudi Arabia afford that? No, is the long and short.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: Not even close. A Neom spokeswoman said the journal was incorrectly interpreting the numbers in that presentation. As for Neom's progress, she said, quote, In some ways, MBS and Saudi Arabia may not need NEOM anymore.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: Remember that when MBS first came to power, he enacted a bunch of social reforms. And Rory says they've had a huge impact. He opens cinemas, he allows live music, he allows men and women to intermingle, and that just creates a completely different environment in other parts of the kingdom like Jeddah and Riyadh.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: And so now it's like one of the coolest places to be in the Middle East. Saudi Arabia now has an entertainment sector and a tourism industry. Most importantly, it's less dependent on oil. In 2023, for the first time, 50% of Saudi Arabia's real GDP came from sources other than oil.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: It's sort of like as MBS was trying to build Neom, this new place where anything was possible, the rest of Saudi Arabia has actually become more like Neom, the place that he was dreaming of. Absolutely, yeah, definitely.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: I think MBS has really initiated a bunch of changes in the rest of the kingdom that mean the raison d'etre for Neom isn't as strong. How would you describe Neom's trajectory now? What do you think it'll become? Neom's not going to go away or going to be canned completely.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: MBS has tied his reputation to Neom so it's still an important project for him it's just like the scale and ambition of it is likely to be scaled back and look totally different than what was first laid out and I sort of go back to that idea that MBS has constantly been sort of saying for almost 10 years it's like if we can just do 50% of what we set out to do then like we'll have completely changed our country.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: Meanwhile, construction on Neom continues. Head over to Google Maps and click toward the northwest corner of Saudi Arabia, and you'll see it. An over 60-mile-long gash cutting through the desert. It's a trench marking the future path of the line.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: The current plan is for Neom to finish the first mile and a half of the line in the next 10 years or so. The rest probably won't be completed for decades, if ever. Even within Neom, people worry that that 60-mile trench is a literal money pit. Performative progress leading to nowhere.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: MBS once said that he wanted to build his pyramids. Only time will tell whether it's a monument to a young leader's vision or his failed ambition. Before we go, I just want to say that this will be my last journal episode for a while.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: I'm going out on paternity leave through the summer, but I'll be back on the show this fall. See you then. That's all for today. Saturday, April 26th. The Journal is a co-production of Spotify and The Wall Street Journal.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: This episode was produced by Annie Minoff and edited by Catherine Brewer. I'm Ryan Knudsen. Additional reporting in this episode by Stephen Kalin and Summer Saeed. Fact-checking by Kate Gallagher. Sound design and mixing by Griffin Tanner. Music in this episode by Emma Munger, Griffin Tanner, and Blue Dot Sessions.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: Our theme music is by So Wiley and remixed by Griffin Tanner. Special thanks to Alex Frangos, Kate Lambaugh, Laura Morris, Sarah Platt, and Tatiana Zemise. Thanks for listening. See you Monday.
