Saudi Arabia’s construction of its megacity project NEOM is projected to cost almost $9 trillion and take over five decades to complete, an internal audit has revealed.
In addition to a comically large bill to pay, Saudi Arabia has a pretty significant issue with attracting outside investors / tourism. I’m guessing most people visiting this thread can’t name the capital of SA (hint, it’s not Dubai… That’s not even in the right country)
No one wants to visit because they’re actively hostile towards even the slightest imposition on their beliefs. It’s hard to justify going somewhere where you could get locked up for what would elsewhere be considered a minor faux pas.
Good luck justifying a $9T vanity project that will only be visited / populated by citizen oil workers, assuming they will even still have jobs in a few decades.
SA needs to undergo some pretty significant cultural shifts before even considering dropping a few trilly on some new digs.
I love me some mega-projects, but as much as I’d love to see Neom succeed, I will be absolutely shocked if it ever becomes something more than a big ditch in the desert.
This is that proposed city that’s just a big rectangle/straight line in the desert?
Yep.
It might be a long straight line, so everything will be as far away from everything else as geometrically possible, but at least it will have a hyperloop inside to quickly travel between parts of the line… Oh wait
Neon was always the stupidest idea ever.
50 years would be 2075, assuming that they don’t run out of money or lose interest by then. The World Cup in 2034 is slightly before 2075. Hence, is the plan to host it in a construction site or doing it digitally in their lovely digital model of the stadium?
Give the players and refs VR rigs and let them work from home
Just passing a bunch of money around at the top.
Compared to the initial cost of $500 billion previously set for the project’s completion, the new cost projected by the audit reaches $8.8 trillion, with the project also reportedly facing another 55 years of construction.
That’s only an $8.3 trillion shortfall. They’ve planned for 5.7% of the needed funds. The rest should be easy to raise.
That cost amounts to more than 25 times the amount of Saudi Arabia’s annual budget, with Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund – the Public Investment Fund (PIF) – itself worth only $925 billion.
Ok. So the PIF can cover about 10% and the rest can come be setting aside 40% of Saudi Arabia’s income for the next 55 years.
It’s not like their income is likely to drop in that time frame. Oil isn’t going anywhere.
According to the audit, there was “evidence of deliberate manipulation” by “certain members of management”.
Say it’s not so!
