The Journal. - Neom, Pt 2: The Emperor’s New Clothes

Episode Date: April 26, 2025

Andy Wirth and Tony Harris moved halfway across the world to help build Neom: Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s futuristic new city in the Saudi desert. But what they found wasn’t the desert utopia of Neom’s marketing. Instead, they found a project bleeding cash, led by a screaming CEO, where very little was actually being built.  WSJ’s Rory Jones and Eliot Brown explain how Neom fell years behind schedule – and went billions of dollars over-budget – thanks to a culture of runaway spending and never telling the boss “no.” Hosted by Ryan Knutson.  Further Listening: - Neom, Pt 1: Skiing in the Desert  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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, Nodmi Al Nasser. He called all of us together, and at that point, I think there were about between four 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. And what was going through my mind was, this can't actually be happening. And I thought to myself, OK, 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 some little lesson about how not to manage. But oh no, this was for real. This was for real. I was shocked. I mean, you know, But oh no, this was for real. This was for real. 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. seen anything like this. Nadym Al Nasser has built a reputation over the decades of getting things done. 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 Nodme. Nodme, everyone we talked to who called him by his first name, became Neom's CEO in 2018. He's an engineer by training, with round glasses and a trimmed 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. We heard this recording of NADME 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 Nodmi in a private meeting. 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. 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 screaming CEO. Neom was also bleeding money, dysfunction reigned, and very little was actually being built. How long did it take you before you started to think,

this is not something that I want to be part of? It was in the neighborhood of maybe 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. 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.

Okay, Martin, let's try one. Remember, big. You got it. The Ford It's a Big Deal event is on. How's that? A little bigger. The Ford It's a Big Deal event. Nice.

Now the offer? Lease a 2025 Escape Active All-Wheel Drive from 198 bi-weekly at 1.99% APR for 36 months with $27.55 down. Wow, that's like $99 a week. Yeah, it's a big deal. The Ford It's a Big Deal event. Visit your Toronto area Ford store or ford.ca today. 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. Were you spending enough money? No. We couldn't spend money quickly enough. We could not spend money quickly enough. 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 mostly a 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. Yes, instead of 10 times that. So, 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. For Andy over at Neom's mountain development, it was the same story. I was, gosh, a couple months into it, we had these, I think, there's something like a town hall meeting. As Andy remembers it, Nodme had called all of Neal'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 for 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. 6 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 that 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. Money's being spent, and therefore we are working, Evans. 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.

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. According to people familiar with Neom's spending, in a single year, Neom paid McKinsey $130 million and PricewaterhouseCoopers $260 million. Here's Tony again. 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 Neal's bosses to protect themselves. If the project fails or there's a problem, I can always turn around and say, look, it's not me. We paid these guys and their associates. Don't blame me.

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. 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. 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? 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 ****. Neal 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. Neom's designs were ambitious, and that was also true for Neom Mountain.

Soon after joining the project, Andy got his first real peek at the plans for the mountain region. And they were an eye-fall. They were intriguing. They were extremely creative. Extremely out there. And I'm an open-minded fella. Some of them seemed outlandish, some of them seemed very creative. They included plans for something called the vault, a glittering glass building filled with stores and hotels that Andy said they were gonna have to dynamite part of a mountain to build. My first thought was, huh, who's going to come here for this? Why would you actually go to Saudi Arabia from anywhere to go to this?

And it just didn't make any sense. Did you think it looked cool? No. I thought it looked ludicrous. It looks inane. It was actually, it was just, let me go straight to it. It looked idiotic. The master, let me just straight to it. I look idiotic. The master plan also called for an artificial lake with a dam that bowed outward in defiance

of traditional engineering. Plus, that desert ski resort Andy was trying to build. And that wasn't all. Talk about the palaces. So you ask about the palaces, but you have to bundle them together with the mansions. I found out that we were to build, I think it was a neighborhood of 40 mansions and 15 palaces in the mountain environment.

The Wall Street Journal obtained some early concept art for these mansions and palaces. And the designs are wild. One palace looks like a ribbon of molten metal suspended over a canyon. Another reminded me of the Eye of Sauron from The Lord of the Rings, the pointy black tower with a red light beaming out the top. Who's buying these, by the way? To Andy, the mansions and palaces just didn't make sense.

Because there was no demand model. There's no sensibility to it. So honestly, it was an extremely perfect, more of the same stupidity way of thinking that seemed to permeate the project. Neo Mountain was getting more expensive. It's a trend that would continue long after Andy left the project. Neo Mountain was getting more expensive. It's a trend that would continue long after Andy left the project. Reporter Elliott Brown saw some internal Neom documents from 2023. By this time, Neo 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 is from, it is $39 billion. 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. According to Neom's auditors and Elliott's own reporting, as costs rose, rather than push for cutbacks to Neom, executives sometimes just fudged 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.

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 around 9% IRR. As Neal'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 Trojanna. In this fall 2023 document we have, you can see that they Trojanna 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.

$704 a night for glamping. And- Must be really glammed up. Yeah. A boutique hiking hotel. The rooms were originally targeted for $489 a night. And 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 percent. Then they added the changes to the hotel rooms and it brought them up to 9.3 percent. 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. 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, according to this audit and the former employees we talked to, essentially delude him with how well it was looking on paper. Elliott 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. Come on, nobody's going to live in a structure like that. When you're inside there, it's gonna 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. ["The New York Times"] From the beginning, people at Neal 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. 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 NIO will need to absorb significant building infrastructure cost 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. You know, people are saying, like, we're really not,

like, building something here that people are going to live and work in. We're 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 wind shade when wind comes from the north or south.

Many, many birds would die. 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? According to Rory and Elliott's reporting, the answer is not so much.

Instead, MBS's executives shielded him from the full scope of Neal'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? 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.

How did they make it clear that you'd be sort of fired if there was any dissent? By witnessing people who were fired? Elliot N. Roy's reporting confirms that employees were often fired for challenging higher-ups on NEOM's costs and feasibility. 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.

Ski executive Andy Worth again. 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 a lunacy, and more. 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. Try and change it. Did you try to change it? Yes. How that went is after the break. Okay, flights on air Canada. How about Prague?

Ooh, Paris, those gardens. Gardens, Amsterdam, Tulip Festival. I see your festival and raise you a carnival in Venice. Or Bermuda has carnaval. Ooh, colorful. You want colorful. Thailand, lantern festival, boom. Book it.

How did we get to Thailand from Prague? Oh right, Prague. Oh boy. Choose from a world of destinations, if you can. Air Canada. Nice travels. One of Andy's favorite things to do at Neom was go hiking up in the mountains. I just love getting into the back country. And I did that many times alone,

just solo hiking back there. Sometimes he'd camp overnight. One of his favorite spots was a literal oasis with palm trees jutting out of the desert rock. The hikes irked his boss, Nodme. I got in so much trouble with Nodme, 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. 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're absolutely gorgeous and beautiful. 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 up, this is what that was like. It was warm, because it was June, July, August. I didn't mind that. But it's intriguing. I thought it was beautiful. And to go in there and to destroy it made no sense. And frankly, I quickly became quite angered about the whole deal.

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. And he was not seeing that balance at Neo Mountain. 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 reservoir, or lake number two. Number three, some of the other smaller, if you will, developments, the hospitality properties. 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.

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. 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.

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. I made the mistake of laughing at him a couple times, because it 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. I could not get that to the Crown Prince without going through Noddy's desk. Andy had known from his earliest days in the job that the plans for Neo Mountain were ambitious,

but he'd hoped he'd be able to change things on the ground. 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.

So my experiences injected into this effort to be able to change a little bit of direction. 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 the exact opposite. Shut up, execute. Rationalize, execute. 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 sh**. It's only when the horse sh** outweighs the gold that you reconsider working here. And I was indifferent about the money, the gold. I was indifferent. But the horse sh** piled up pretty quickly in my bucket.

Andy left Neom in September of 2020. He just got on the plane. He didn't tell Nodmi he was quitting until he was out of the country. He lasted five months. Tony lasted a bit longer. The illicit wine might've 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. How would you doctor the fruit juice? 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 people would cart them away in wheelbarrows.

What would you talk about over the moonshine with your friends? How nuts we all are. But we were there. And 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. 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. 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 Hinckley, or somebody was waiting until they paid off their kid's college tuition. I think you get the drift. 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.

We said, we've come this far. was keeping you going? Well, I think we wanted to stick it out. We said, we've come this far. Maybe it's going to get better. 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.

Just they can't take the work environment. Tony and his wife left Neal 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. 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. 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.

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 three billion dollars over budget. The pressure was growing for Nodme 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.

But the spectacle couldn't entirely distract from the embarrassing truth about Sandala. 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. 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 Nodme. We don't know why, but the Neom employees were quite surprised by that. They took it as a sign

of disapproval. And then three weeks later, Saudi decides to shake up Neom. Within weeks, NADME leaves as the CEO. Reporter Rory Jones again. The sort of exact details about what happened and why, whether he's pushed isn't clear, 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. Nodmi had presided over years of ballooning costs, staff churn and push deadlines.

The dance of delusion had thrived on his watch. 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? 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 that it's going to be progressive. 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. And there's just a complete culture clash there. Since Nodmi's departure, Saudi Arabia's sovereign wealth fund, the PIF, has taken more direct control of NIO. And they're finally coming to grips with the project's true cost. 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. Not even close. I feel like I already know the answer to this question, but can Saudi Arabia afford that? No. It is the long and short. Not even close. A NIOEM spokeswoman said the journal was incorrectly interpreting the numbers in that presentation. As for NIOEM's progress, she said, Our priorities remain intact and all five of our regions are underway, with 103 active construction sites across NIOEM.

Five of our regions are underway, with 103 active construction sites across Neom. In some ways, MBS in Saudi Arabia may not need Neom anymore. 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 mingle, and that just creates a completely different environment in other parts of the kingdom like Jeddah and Riyadh. 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. 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. 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. MBS has tied his reputation to Neom and 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 we'll have completely

changed our country. 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. 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. 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. 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. This episode was produced by Annie Minoff and edited by Katherine Brewer. I'm Ryan Knudson.

Additional reporting in this episode by Stephen Kalin and Summer Said. 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. 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 Zamis. Thanks for listening. See you Monday.