NEOM Stopped. The People Who Sold It Didn’t Leave Empty-Handed.
April 2024, Hong Kong. A desert city was in Asia looking for money. The event was called “Discover NEOM” — the final stop of a tour that had come through Beijing and Shanghai, on an itinerary that also included Seoul and Tokyo. On stage, The Line was presented as a 170-kilometer city of the future, and the CEO spoke of “tangible on-the-ground progress.”
Earlier that same month, Bloomberg had reported that the city’s internal plan had been cut from 170 kilometers to 2.4. A reduction of 98.6 percent. The distance between the report and the stage was two weeks.
Asia listened politely. And kept its wallet closed. There is no confirmed record of investment secured. At the time, this looked like the roadshow’s failure.
Two years later, look at the list again. Construction, according to reports, is halted until after 2030. Sixteen billion dollars has been set aside over the next five years just to cancel contracts — more than has been budgeted for new construction. And this past July, the company deleted the words “nine million residents” from its website, explaining the change as a routine update to enhance user experience.
If anyone in that Hong Kong ballroom had opened their wallet, their money would be somewhere on this list now.
The people who built the stage were many. Even counting only what lobbying disclosures and investigative reporting have confirmed, the roster is long. According to the Wall Street Journal, one consulting firm earned $130 million a year while involved in both drafting the project’s business plan and validating it. One global PR firm ran the project’s entire communications department on contracts worth more than $30 million; another, among the largest in the world, billed over $10 million. Agencies belonging to all four of the world’s major advertising holding companies appear in the project’s campaign history. One branding firm had been building the city’s narrative since 2017, in round-the-clock shifts. The promotional films drew well over a hundred million views; 3D billboards rose in Times Square and Piccadilly Circus; a “NEOM House” was built at Davos — the showroom completed before the city. There was a 15-second teaser campaign that followed people’s search histories, a series commissioned on a documentary channel, and the Hong Kong roadshow stage itself was produced by an events firm. And one polling company regularly measured the city’s “brand health.” There was a contract to measure the health of the brand. There was no contract to measure the health of the city. At the launch party of an island that has never opened to the public since, Hollywood stars stood on stage. An entire industry was paid to make the announcement. Now that the announcement has proven false, not one of them has issued a correction.
So let us ask the question nobody asks. Among them, the ones paid for the design and the numbers — did they truly not know this could not work? The physics of a 170-kilometer wall of glass. The logistics of the middle of a desert. The scale of the materials. Where, exactly, nine million residents were supposed to come from. With this much to check at the level of common sense, could it be that among all those experts, no one knew?
It is not that they didn’t know. The record survives. According to the Financial Times, which interviewed some twenty former insiders, one architect warned in a meeting that a thirty-story building hung upside down from a bridge would sway like a pendulum until it snapped. An internal audit calculated a total cost of $8.8 trillion and reported it to the board. And in documents reviewed by the Wall Street Journal, there is an email — an executive instructing consultants not to bring up costs before a key meeting. The knowledge was in the building. It was on the payroll. They did not fail to know. They kept what they knew outside the scope of their contracts. Physics belonged to the structures team, logistics to the logistics team, demand to the consultants. Checking whether the whole added up was nobody’s job. Or, to be precise, it was exactly one person’s job — and nowhere in the organization was there a seat for telling that person no.
The sequence is also on record. The picture came first. The sketchbook was shown to the world before the arithmetic was done, and once the picture was public, arithmetic became disloyalty.
It is hard to blame them. They were paid, and they did as instructed. But the fact that this excuse holds is precisely the defect of this industry. If the person who manufactures and sells conviction bears no designed responsibility for what that conviction causes, then the conviction was never a thing that should have been for sale.
The structure is simple. In this industry, payment arrives at the announcement. Accountability arrives at delivery. In between, everyone who spoke has left. The campaign wins its awards, the team disbands, the portfolio is updated, and the next announcement begins.
And the answers you would get from those who left are already written. It was Saudi decision-making. Oil prices collapsed. A war broke out. All true — except for the order. The report of the cut to 2.4 kilometers came in the spring of 2024. The $8.8 trillion calculation went to the board in 2024. The architect’s warning reached print in November 2025. The war came in February 2026. What the war did was not end the project. It handed everyone their exit lines.
Those lines will be completed on a résumé. A few years from now, in some conference room, they will say: I worked on NEOM. Saudi selected our proposal. It was halted — the war, oil prices — and that sentence will count in their favor, not against them. The fame of the world’s most famous project stays on the résumé; the outcome becomes external circumstance. The failed city is harvested one more time, on paper. If the fee was the first payment, the credential is the second.
“Nine million residents” was deleted from the website. “NEOM” will never be deleted from a résumé.
In Andersen’s tale, what everyone remembers is the naked emperor. But read it again: what the tailors sold was not clothes. It was a condition — this cloth is invisible to anyone unfit for his office. That single sentence did all the work. The emperor never had to threaten anyone. In a structure where saying “I don’t see it” is a confession of incompetence, the courtiers said they saw it on their own. The silence was manufactured not by command but by condition, and under that condition, everyone with a position saw the cloth.
The tailors were not in the crowd at the parade. They had already been paid. And the emperor marched to the very end — because he was the only one with the authority to stop the parade. The real question of the tale is not why the emperor walked naked. It is why no one ever disputed the tailors’ invoice. And what they sold in the next city.
So — they are innocent. The money they summoned never came. That there are no victims is owed not to their restraint but to their failure. The campaign’s innocence derives entirely from the campaign not working.
Then let us ask the last question. When the money is received, is the responsibility for the work truly over? The custom of this industry has always answered yes.
The culture I grew up in taught otherwise. Six hundred years ago, when Korea built its fortress walls, the names of the men who built each section were carved into the stone. Those stones still stand in the walls of Seoul. The names were not carved for honor. They were carved so that if the wall fell, the builder could be found. What a stonemason accepted along with his name six hundred years ago, an industry that sells conviction for a fee today does not accept. Money ends the transaction. It does not end the signature. What you make keeps your name on it — every craft stands on that principle, and this industry alone has developed the technique of detaching the name from the failure and attaching it only to the fee.
I have worked in this industry. So I know what its licensing exam should be. There is one question on it.
When the people I told to come have arrived — will I still be standing there?