MBS’s $500B Desert Dream Just Keeps Getting Weirder

This trainwreck is full of good lines to pull out, but this one really hits. I guess this is the kinda shit you cook up when you're unimaginably rich and anyone who tells you no gets bone saw'd.

In an interview the same day with Bloomberg News, MBS explained that Neom’s most important innovation would be its legal framework. He said that in a place like New York, there’s an inconvenient need for laws to serve citizens as well as the private sector. “But Neom, you have no one there,” he said, omitting mention of the tens of thousands of Saudis then living in the area. As a result, regulations could be based on the desires of investors alone. “Imagine if you are the governor of New York without having any public demands,” MBS said. “How much would you be able to create for the companies and the private sector?”

> Within a few months of the Ritz-Carlton announcement, satellite images showed that a series of large buildings was already under construction, surrounded by expanses of greenery that stuck out sharply from the desert. It was a new palace for the crown prince, where he’d soon be spending much of his time.

How many palaces for this dude? He already has one spare $300 million palace in Paris [1] and a $500 million floating palace [2], lol.

1- https://www.cnbc.com/2017/12/18/crown-prince-bin-salman-has-...

2- http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/16/world/rise-of-saudi-prince...

I imagine the lesson that will be learned from success or failure of this project going to be used for a long time for many other mega city constructions. This is basically a new architecture and design for an urban area differing from any existing ones.

“I was not alone in realizing that it was spurious at best,” Andy Wirth, an American hospitality executive who worked on Neom in 2020, says of the project. “The complete absence of being tethered to reality, objectively, is what was demonstrated there.”

Dang.

the original concept for a series of interconnected low-rise communities gradually evolved into an idea for two parallel mega-structures, as tall as the Empire State Building, that would extend horizontally for dozens of miles—cf https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prora qv

Oh look, the petty prince has cried for a town.......boohoo