Name: Why Saudi Arabia’s $2 Trillion Line City is Failing
Uploaded: 2026-03-12T17:00:03.000Z
Duration: 44 min 40 s
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Something fascinating is arising out of the barren deserts of Saudi Arabia.

In early 2021, the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, de facto ruler of the country, Mohammed Bin Salman or MBS for short, revealed a project to the world that he called the Line a linear city of gargantuan proportions that the Saudi Kingdom would begin constructing in the remote northwestern corner of their country.

The proposal would be built out in segments over a series of decades.

And in its final form, the Line is envisioned as consisting of two twin skyscrapers, each 500 meters tall, separately separated by a width of 200 meters and running continually for a whopping 170 kilometers across the arid desert landscape, enclosing an open atrium between the two skyscrapers on the floor, like a super long, fully enclosed walled city.

To put the sheer scale of the ambition of this project into perspective, the height of each of the Line's twin skyscrapers will be similar to the heights of some of the world's already tallest existing buildings, like the one World Trade center and the Central Park Tower in New York or the Willits Tower in Chicago Bridge.

But unlike any of those pre existing buildings, each of the Line's skyscrapers will run at about this height for 170 km.

About the same distance as New York City is to Wilmington, Delaware.

Or about the same length as the entire width of Connecticut from end to end, east to west.

Or about the same distance as Los Angeles is from San Diego.

Or for a European perspective, about the same distance as London is from Birmingham once it's completed.

The the Saudi government claims that the Line will eventually be home to 9 million people, more than the population of New York City.

And all contained within a supposedly super efficient floor space of just 34 square kilometers, which seems small in terms of land, but

is massive in terms of floor space within a building because that's 29% more floor space than every single building in all five boroughs of new York City combined.

And unlike New York City or really any other city in the world today, the Line has been advertised as being a completely car free environment with without any roads at all, where everyone living inside will be no more than a five minute walk from anything they would need or want on a daily basis to get from one part of the line's 170 kilometer length to another.

Transportation for people and freight will be performed by a super fast underground train running beneath the line that has been advertised as capable of traversing the entire 170 kilometer length in as little as just 20 minutes.

While the entire structure has also been advertised as Running completely on green, renewable energy with zero emissions.

And then on top of all of that, the line has been further advertised as having flying robot taxis that'll whisk people away between destinations, robotic housemaids, an animatronic robotic version of Jurassic park, an artificial moon, and

a constant 24 hour surveillance system controlled by ubiquitous artificial intelligence.

It has been advertised as nothing less than a complete revolution in urban design and the human living experience for the 21st century.

While in reality, it is rapidly becoming one of humanity's greatest unmitigated disaster.

Since it was unveiled in 2021, the effort to actually build the line has actually transformed into the single largest ongoing construction project Happening anywhere on the planet.

And it's likely already become one of, if not the largest, construction projects in human history.

The Saudi kingdom has gathered together an army of excavators, trucks, and

workers that are currently all hard at work carving out millions of cubic meters worth of sand across the desert where the line's foundation is expected to eventually be laid.

All as MBS has compared the project's scope to the Egyptian pyramids and referred to it as a civilizational revolution.

But as it's turned out, Even for a kingdom that's as fabulously wealthy and powerful as Saudi Arabia, Fully accomplishing a project of this magnitude and ambition Is still probably just a bit too much to manage.

The projected cost for finishing the line's total length of 170km has ballooned in price more than 10 times over again from its initial projection of only $200 billion.

When it was revealed back in 2021, estimates from employees on the project today in 2024 of at least $2 trillion.

And to put that price tag into perspective, that's roughly twice the size of Saudi Arabia's entire nominal GDP.

And it's pretty comparable to the total annual nominal GDP of Brazil, a nation of more than 215 million people.

And even then, the $2 trillion price tag circulating around today is widely believed to still be a massive underestimation by several independent analysts.

When it was first announced In January of 2021, Saudi officials very optimistically claimed that the line's first residents of the 9 million total who would eventually call it home, would begin moving into the structure by the first quarter of 2024, while they even further claimed that the first 16km of the line's total length would also be completed and a whopping 1.5 million residents would all be moved into it just by the end of the decade.

In 2030, as work continued on building out the rest of the Line's form in a modular process over the span of decades afterwards to goal of 170km and 9 million people.

But then, just a couple of months ago, In April of 2024, the kingdom quietly released an update that significantly cut back on its initial optimistic ambitions for the line, with sources involved in the project's construction alleging to Bloomberg that the Saudi government now currently only plans for about 2.4 kilometers of the line's length to actually be completed by 2030 instead, a huge 85% reduction in the initial development target that had been set for then.

While they also only expect that fewer than 300,000 residents will be living in the line by then, an 80% reduction in their initial target residence by 2030 as well.

Despite these setbacks, however, Saudi government officials and the Line's representatives continue to insist that the line is a long term, multi decade commitment of the Kingdom that will continue being built out across the 21st century all the way until the final version of 170km and 9 million residents is accomplished.

It'll simply take them longer than they initially expected to get there, they say.

But in only the first four years of the project's development, it has already been plagued by almost countless engineering, management and financial mishaps that have substantially delayed its progress already.

While many other people involved with the project and countless independent observers and analysts expect that the project is a completely unrealistic fever dream that has no possible chance of success at ever actually becoming a reality, and

in order to understand the true scale of the Line's absurdity and potentially even insanity, it helps to begin with the rise of the single man whose limitless ambition and ruthlessness is causing the entire project to happen in the first place.

The Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia himself, Mohammed bin Salman, MBS's father, is the current reigning King of Saudi Arabia, King Salman.

Salman himself is one of more than 100 children that were produced by Saudi Arabia's original founder and the country's first king, Ibn Saudi Saud.

Ever since Ibn Saud's death in 1953, the Saudi kingdom has been continually ruled as one of the world's final remaining hereditary absolute monarchies by six of Ibn Saud's own direct sons.

King Salman himself is among Ibn Saud's youngest surviving children today, who was born in 1935 when his father was already 60, while Salman himself has 13 of his own children.

King Salman is also turning 89 years old this year.

And so, as the generation of Saudi kings made up exclusively of Ibn Saud's own direct sons began aging out.

It became clear in the 2010s that the next generation of Saudi kings would eventually have to be pulled from the pool of Ibn Saud's grandchildren.

Next, King Salman ascended to the kingdom's throne in 2015 upon the death of his older brother Abdullah at the age of 90.

And Salman quickly appointed his young seventh son, Mohammad bin Salman, as the acting deputy Crown prince and the kingdom's defense minister.

Within only two years from then, MBS managed to outmaneuver everybody else in the Saudi court and rapidly consolidated his own power to the point where he managed to secure the position of Saudi Arabia's sole crown prince and heir apparent to the throne by 2017, by which point he was already widely viewed as the kingdom's de facto ruler.

At the young age of only 32 years old, he was later appointed by his father as the kingdom's acting prime minister, and

he will inevitably succeed his nearly 90 year old father as the nation's next king after he eventually passes.

MBS is a young man who effectively rules a kingdom as its absolute monarch, appointed by God himself, like Louis XIV did in France, but

in the 21st century rather than in the 17th century.

His absolute power and authority in Saudi Arabia today is within a country of 37 million people, an annual nominal GDP of more than US$1.1 trillion that is similarly sized to Turkey or the Netherlands, that controls the second largest known reserves of oil and the sixth largest known reserves of natural gas on the planet, and

a sovereign wealth fund with assets of more than $700 billion.

This is more absolute power than anything even Louis XIV could have possibly conceived of during his rule in France.

The word of MBS is literally the law within this kingdom, and

whatever he wants to do is what the entire kingdom will end up doing.

And as it's turned out, MBS has been a rather bold leader who's made several controversial decisions that have damaged both his own personal reputation and as well as his country's reputation on the world stage.

As the kingdom's defense minister, MBS was the architect of the Saudi military intervention into Yemen that began in 2015 and quickly transformed into a costly and bloody quagmire that directly killed thousands of Yemeni civilians and Saudi soldiers that heavily contributed to Yemen's collapse into what has often been described as being among the 21st century's most horrible humanitarian catastrophes.

He further led Saudi Arabia into launching a total land, sea and air blockade of neighboring Qatar in 2017 that lasted for years until 2021.

That ultimately ended in another Saudi failure.

And he boldly ordered the kidnapping of the Prime Minister of Lebanon in 2017 and had his security forces force him into temporarily resigning from his office.

And on top of MBS's decisions in an absolute monarchy that have affected its reputation, Saudi Arabia is also a country that is highly overdependent on its massive oil resources.

For its current level of prosperity, oil alone still accounts for roughly 40% of the kingdom's entire economy, in addition to about 87% of the Saudi government's operating budget revenue and a whopping 90% of the country's total export earnings.

And in a changing 21st century world where concerns about climate change and moving on from oil to renewable energy are ever increasingly growing trends, there is a cause for concern in the kingdom to diversify its economy away from its presently huge oil dependency to better safeguard its future.

So naturally, after he assumed de facto power in the kingdom, MbS moved quickly to address this concern about diversifying Saudi Arabia's economy away from oil.

And he believed that the best way to do that was by encouraging the development of a brand new kind of tourism in the country.

As the location of the two holiest sites in all of Islam in Mecca and Medina, Saudi Arabia had long been the site of a large number of religious tourists who came from the rest of the Islamic world for their Hajj pilgrimage to Mecca.

But hardly any non Muslims ever visited Saudi Arabia for any reason from the Western world unless they were involved in the oil or defense industries.

MBS looked to the huge success of the neighboring United Arab Emirates in encouraging their own tourism industry from scratch to diversify their own economy away from oil with well known flashy megaprojects like the Burj Khalifa, the tallest building in the world, the Burj Al Arab, one of the most well known and opulently luxurious hotels in the world, and

Western branded amusement parks like Ferrari World that includes the fastest roller coaster in the world, Formula Rasa.

Even with the well publicized failures of other megaprojects in the country, like the World Islands Project that remains abandoned today, the United Arab Emirates still managed to successfully invest their oil money into developing enough projects that did actually work out that within the timespan of only 30 years, the UAE's tourism industry went from being practically non existent to becoming one of the most booming and thriving in the entire world.

With Dubai in particular getting catapulted in only 30 years from a remote fishing village that nobody had ever heard of into the third most visited city by international tourists in the entire world, surpassing even traditional tourism hotspot cities like Paris and New York in the process.

And tourism now accounts for roughly 10% of the UAE's entire economy.

MBS was determined to attract even more foreign tourists and their money to Saudi Arabia and be even more successful at doing it than the United Arab Emirates had been.

After all, the Saudis had way more oil and way more money than the Emiratis had, so they felt that they could afford even bigger and even bolder projects to lure their tourists away.

And this was the driving rationale that led to MBS's ambitious introduction of the NEOM project in 2017, shortly after he had consolidated his power in the kingdom.

Linguistically, NEOM is a portmanteau that combines the Greek word for new neos with the Arabic word for future Mustakbal.

And as it was envisioned by the prince then, NEOM would become the centerpiece project of Saudi Arabia's so called Vision 2030 program that is meant to overhaul the entire country's economy away from the oil industry.

NEOM was intended to be a massive urban development program on a scale the likes of which had never been attempted before in human history, with an initially projected budget of $500 billion.

In a remote and undeveloped corner of Saudi Arabia's northwest, the area selected for NEOM's development is roughly the size of the US state of Massachusetts, in a very sparsely populated part of the kingdom's Tabuk Province, a province that is currently only home to around 910,000 people in total.

And two thirds of all of them just simply live in the city of Tabuk itself, out on the perimeter of the area to be develop for neom.

The area to be set aside for NEOM was advertised as being built out on a veritable blank canvas of nearly empty and undeveloped land, with a plethora of ultra ambitious projects that would be carried out within it.

As Saudi Arabia has no permanent rivers or lakes at all, and

NEOM exists within one of the country's lowest level of rainfall areas, the area has virtually no available freshwater resources whatsoever.

While the temperatures in the summer will routinely soar to more than 38 degrees Celsius or 100 Fahrenheit.

That's why all throughout human history, hardly anyone has ever chosen to actually live in this hostile environment, and

why many towns located within the area were never even connected to the country's electricity grid until well into the 1980s.

But none of that stopped MBS from boasting in 2017.

That NEOM would soon, within due time, be home to an urban population greater than New York City's.

Neom, of course, is the area where the line would later be revealed as a project, years later in 2021.

But the truly absurd thing about NEOM as an overall project is that for all of its outrageousness, the line might not even be the most insane project going on there.

There are other mega ambitious projects going on here as well, like the Oxagon, a huge industrial port area to begin transporting people and material to a part of the country where currently hardly anything exists.

Shaped like an octagon between the facilities on the land and the sea, with a navigation channel for cargo and cruise ships to take between them, the structure will include a massive floating industrial sector on pontoon structures that billed as being the largest floating structure in the world once it's eventually completed, it is intended to serve as the logistics nerve center for the rest of the projects going on in Neom once it's completed.

There's supposed to be a luxury island and yacht resort built in the Red Sea called Sindalah.

A beach called Silver beach that was proposed would feature a beach lined with crushed marble that would glow and shimmer in the sunlight like silver.

A plethora of luxury hotels and ambitious skyscraper projects across the coast of the Gulf of Aqaba, including a project billed as an upside down city skyscraper they call a Quelum, a skyscraper built down into the ground rather than up in the sky that'll require visitors to travel on a submarine to enter through the underwater open square in the building's cavernous interior.