NEOM has nothing to do with 3rd parties claiming to offer a NEOM cryptocurrency
neom.com
neom.com
There is no end of stupid ideas you can generate while you are rich and unaccountable.
Besides they aren't targeting us, but similarly stupidly rich people. Although I heard no one trusts them after the whole bugging bezos phone incident.
And they could get some money, tell some guys in hard hats to drive some tractors around the desert, wait a few months, "Oh, we ran into some difficulties/new economic reality, project cancelled. Your money? Hiring men to drive those tractors weren't cheap you know!" (Read: "The men were South Asian slaves but the construction company boss is driving a new Mercedes now, and hey, he's actually my cousin and we're going golfing tomorrow!")
Nice to see they have ethics. /s
Honestly the goals for the project seems lofty and in some ways seems like a scam itself.
The engineering feasibility and the economics behind the fancy 3d renderings is simply not there.
So is this all just image massaging? To try and associate Saudi Arabia with things other than the executions, human rights abuses, etc.? I did see some interesting analysis that the massive spending on advertising and advertorials by oil and gas companies in papers like the New York Times did seem to have an effect on softening how the papers covered climate change and the impacts of fossil fuels... Maybe this is the same idea?
The last attempt to deploy it resulted in tech unicorns that at best don’t make much profit, and at worst were an absolute bust like WeWork. (Saudi Arabia was $45B of the initial $100B Softbank Vision Fund.)
Think of it as a Truman show for westerners, same as Dubai and Doha. All three want a city like that so that they appear progressive, technologically advanced, and a good place to move to with high salaries and little to no taxes (Sharia has a designated exception for non-Muslims[0] that comes in handy).
As long as they keep that image and keep Europeans and Americans happy, they can do as many human rights abuses as they want, while also allowing westerners to live there completely blind of the abuse that's literally all around them.
And because of the war and Europe looking elsewhere for more natural gas and oil, Arabian peninsula is about to get even more unfathomably rich and build even more stupid impractical structures. Qatar in particular, there's a giant natural gas reserve under the Persian Gulf between Qatar and Iran.
The only thing that surprises me is why it took so long for Saudi Arabia to build a city like that.
Yeah I tend to agree. But at least crypto has been done before many times. And in some cases, it’s actually worked out quite well.
NEOM on the other hand, I don’t know.
This seems unusually apt for NEOM.