The Journal. - Neom, Pt 1: Skiing in the Desert

Episode Date: April 25, 2025

In 2017, Saudi Arabia’s ambitious, young leader, Mohammed bin Salman, unveiled Neom: a futuristic new city Saudi Arabia would build in the desert. Neom would be a hotspot for tourism like the French Riviera, a center of innovation like Silicon Valley, and a global melting pot like Dubai. It would help transform the Saudi economy. But over the years, that already bold plan grew even more ambitious.   In the first of two episodes about Neom, WSJ’s Rory Jones and Eliot Brown explain how an effort to pivot the Saudi economy away from oil grew to encompass plans for a desert ski resort and skyscrapers the length of Connecticut. Plus we hear from two people who uprooted their lives and moved to Neom to help make MBS’s dream a reality. Hosted by Ryan Knutson.  Sign up for WSJ’s free What’s News newsletter.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Ladies and gentlemen, it is an honor to be with you this afternoon as we kick off a very special part of the program right now. As we watch something of a revolution happening here in Saudi Arabia. It was 2017 in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. Inside the conference hall of a splashy hotel, Fox business host Maria Bartiromo was kicking off Saudi Arabia's big investor conference, sometimes called Davos in the Desert. Gathered beneath glittering chandeliers were the movers and shakers of the business world. They were there to witness a historic announcement.

Please welcome to the stage, ladies and gentlemen, His Royal Highness, Prince Mohammed bin Salman. Addressing his audience in Arabic, Saudi Arabia's young leader, MBS as he's known, unveiled plans for a place he called Niom. We have the opportunity to be in Niom. Niom was a futuristic new city that Saudi Arabia would build from scratch in the middle of the desert. A flashy video drove the idea home. Here we see the birth of NEOM, the world's most ambitious project,

a destination of the future, a vision that is becoming reality. We see a chance to design a better way of life, with a blueprint for sustainable living. There's this big video of what the northwest of his country is going to look like. And Neom is going to build Neom there and it's going to be this futuristic city. My colleague Rory Jones covers the Middle East. He remembers this announcement and what happened next.

MBS pulls out two phones. One is like the Nokia 6210 or something we all had in the 90s or 2000s. Like the one you could play Snake on or whatever, right? That's exactly right, yeah. And he pulls out an iPhone, a smartphone, and he says, you know, he compares Neom and the kingdom with the technological leap of those two phones. The difference that is going to happen in Neom as a zone, as a city, is like the difference between this phone and this phone.

This is what we're going to achieve in Neom. MBS's message? With Neom, he was going to transform cities, the same way Apple transformed phones. MBS wanted to create this place that was going to be a mix of the French Riviera where people would go on vacation there and it was going to have touches of Silicon Valley companies are going to want to set up there and create businesses of the future. And then it was going to have splashes of Dubai, whereas this is sort of melting pot of different cultures. And so, yeah, I remember hearing about Neom and thinking,

wow, like, this is like a huge, huge change. But I also remember thinking like, I'm not quite sure what this is. Rory had questions. What exactly was NeM going to be? Who would build it? How quickly? Could Saudi Arabia and MBS actually pull this off?

So, he and a team of Wall Street Journal reporters started digging. Over the past seven years, they've talked to dozens of people who moved to the Saudi desert to work on Neom, and they've pored over thousands of pages of internal documents. What do you find most interesting about the Neom story? I find everything interesting about the Neom story is the ambition. Like it is a very very ambitious project. It's one of the world's most ambitious projects. It is currently the world's biggest construction project. And so, you know, you could throw as many superlatives at it as you want, but it's a big deal.

But their reporting shows that the project is years behind schedule and projected to be trillions of dollars over budget. And MBS's dream of a desert utopia is looking more like a nightmare. Welcome to The Journal, our show about money, business, and power. I'm Ryan Knudson. It's Friday, April 25th. Over the next two episodes, we'll be telling the story of Nihon. This is part one, but NEOM declined. In a statement, a NEOM spokeswoman said the project had started the year on, quote, a

positive footing. She noted that, like any large project, Neom continues to make changes to ensure its long-term success. She also said that Neom is, quote, unprecedented in terms of ambition and scale. This is how Neom supporters have often described it. As a breathtakingly ambitious, even utopian project, Neom would be the next stage of human development, an experiment and a better way of living. But Neom was also supposed to be something else.

A practical solution to some of the kingdom's most pressing problems. Well, a royal shakeup in Saudi Arabia, King Salman has promoted his 31-year-old son to become crown prince of the kingdom. Mohammed bin Salman was appointed— MBS was still in his early 30s when he assumed de facto control of Saudi Arabia. His father, King Salman, named him crown prince in 2017. From the beginning, MBS was well aware that leading his country into the future would be a tough brief.

The kingdom faced a number of challenges that really were almost like a ticking time bomb for a country that they'd have to solve. Problem number one was demographic. Saudi Arabia's population was young and growing. Seventy percent of the kingdom's population were under 30, so MBS had to find ways to employ those people. — But that would be difficult because of Problem 2. — Seventy percent of Saudis were also employed by the government at that point.

And why was that? It's because most of Saudi Arabia's revenues at the time were derived from oil. Oil. If you had a job in Saudi Arabia, you likely either worked for the state-run oil company or your government job, let's say a teacher, was paid using oil money. Oil was what made the Saudi state run.

It was oil all the way down. And MBS knew it couldn't last. We have a case of oil addiction in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia on the part of everyone. It's a serious issue. It's disrupted the development of many sectors in years past. He could see on the horizon a time when the demand for oil would dry up. And so he understood that he needed to diversify his economy. He needed to diversify the government's revenue streams. He needed to create jobs for all these young people in his country. And he needed to get more people out of the public sector into the private sector.

MBS started to tackle some of these big economic problems with social reforms. When it came to power, men and women weren't allowed to socialize in public. Less than 20% of the workforce were women, and there wasn't much popular entertainment to speak of. MBS began to change that. A big day for women in Saudi Arabia, allowed behind the wheel for the first time as the world's last. He allowed women to drive and made it easier for them to enter the workforce. He allowed men and women to mix freely in public. He opened cinemas for the first time in like 40 years, which was like a huge moment.

The Hollywood film Black Panther is the first movie to be screened at an AMC entertainment theater in Riyadh. Because how do you build a consumer economy? Give people stuff to spend their money on? MBS's social reforms could only go so far though. This was still Saudi Arabia. It was still a bastion of conservative Islam, still governed by Sharia law. So he's also thinking about, well, is there anywhere in the kingdom that I can just start with a blank canvas?

And so as the story goes, he's looking at a map of Saudi Arabia and he's looking at all the different areas of his country. And he sees that there is this part of northwest Saudi Arabia where it's vastly populated. Here's MBS in a Discovery Channel documentary talking about the genesis of Nioh. Northwest of Saudi Arabia, untouched, almost empty. It have mix of topography, mountains, valleys,

oases, dunes, beaches, islands, corals, from skiing to diving, that's the place. And he understands that it has a lot of the natural ingredients to make a new, exciting city-state within his kingdom. The area MBS was planning to develop was huge, roughly the size of Massachusetts. And it wasn't a completely blank slate. There were villages there, and native tribes who had been calling the area home for generations. They'd need to be relocated, by force if necessary. But for an authoritarian ruler like MBS, that didn't present much of an impediment. No,

this area was a place where he could enact the radical changes the rest of Saudi Arabia wasn't ready for. In Neom, foreigners would be welcome. It would have its own business-friendly legal system. It would be a home for new industries—tourism, media, biotech, clean energy—that could help diversify the Saudi economy. And it would be more socially liberal. Women could wear bikinis at the beach. There were even discussions about allowing alcohol. And so, MBS went to the people you go to, to turn lofty, fantastical visions into reality.

Management consultants. Neon brought in McKinsey, Boston Consulting Group, Oliver Wyman, like a who's who of the management consulting world. Part of the reason he turns to management consultants is because there wasn't a lot of expertise in particular industries that he wanted to create at Neom. There wasn't really a tourism industry, there wasn't a tech industry, and so he needs outside expertise to try to help him deliver on this vision and what these management consultants do is they put all their ideas together down in more than like 2,000 pages of planning documents for what Neil might look like. More than 2,000 pages of wow. Yeah it was like the Wall Street Journal got access to these in around 2019.

I remember the first thing I remember thinking is, how am I gonna get through all these, you know, these 2,000 pages to read all this stuff? Those 2,000 pages are not a plan for Neom per se. It's more like a brainstorming document of every conceivable amenity a city of the future could possibly have. And some of these ideas are straight out of sci-fi. This is an idea for like a Jurassic Park, like a theme park of robot dinosaurs.

There are flying taxis. Robots that would clean your house for you while you're out at work. Classes taught by hologram teachers. More Michelin-starred restaurants than anywhere else in the world. Some of the wildest ideas came from MBS himself. These documents show how he, in board meetings, is like putting forward ideas for what he wants. You know, he wants a beach that will glow

like your watch glows in the dark. And he's also keen on this idea of a moon that can rise with drones every night at Neom and become this sort of showpiece. This sounds like Las Vegas on acid. That is a great way of describing it. Yeah, yeah. Las Vegas on acid. That is a great way of describing it.

Yeah. In the end, the plants for Neom roughly coalesced around five key developments, each with an appropriately dramatic name. There was Magna, Neom's string of luxury beachfront hotels, Sindala, an island with a cluster of resorts, Oxagon, a port on the Red Sea, Trojena, a mountain resort. And then there was Neom's centerpiece, the actual city part of this futuristic city-state. It was called The Line.

This is a wild idea. My colleague Elliot Brown spent years covering real estate. The Line is unlike any building he's ever seen, or even ever dreamed about for that matter. At its full vision, it's absolutely enormous. If you just look at the square footage as envisioned, it would have more square footage than all of New York City. The Line is a skyscraper, or rather, two skyscrapers running parallel to each other. Each tower would stretch 1,600 feet into the air, taller than the Empire State Building,

and also run for 106 miles, roughly the length of Connecticut. Yes, that is two skyscrapers side by side running for 106 miles. In pictures, it's undeniably striking. Breathtaking, almost. The outside of the building would be covered with mirrored glass, so that it reflects the desert landscape, blurring the line where the structure ends and nature begins. The entire complex would house around 9 million people. But people would live inside of it. Like, you wouldn't have open air?

The middle would essentially be a giant atrium. Some people get a window view looking out, other people get a window view looking in, and then there's this essentially 600-foot space between the buildings, where sometimes it's open air, sometimes it's parks sort of spliced between these buildings. You have some large venues, like you'd have a stadium suspended between the two towers. MBS often would tell people he wanted zero gravity architecture.

What does that mean? Like architecture that looks like it defies physics. The idea of building a city in a line, that came from MBS's architects. But turning it into a skyscraper? MBS has said that was his idea. You know, developers are generally always dreamers. And when I cover real estate, they'd often come up with like crazy ideas for, you know,

a building that looks like a corkscrew and goes a thousand feet up. But at the end of the day, they'd have to convince other investors and banks to give them the money to do it. And if you had a thousand-foot corkscrew, you wouldn't find enough investors and banks to do it. So they don't never get built. This is a structure where you don't have those guardrails. That's because MBS is both the developer and the bank.

MBS is the chair of Neom's board, in addition to being the chair of every subproject within Neom. He's also the chair of Neom's main funder, Saudi Arabia's sovereign wealth fund, home to about a trillion dollars of the country's oil wealth. If MBS wanted the line, he was in a good position to get it. The Saudi government and the Saudi wealth fund did not respond to requests for comment. But why does MBS need the line? Why not just build a fancy yet achievable city? Yeah, it's a good question. I think it's early on in the planning of Neom, in a meeting, MBS goes to his urban planners, I want to build my pyramids.

He's essentially thinking about Neom in the context of the pyramids of Giza, which have been around for thousands of years. He wants to make that kind of physical mark on the land. So then it's not just about changing Saudi Arabia or even reinventing the idea of a city, it's also about ego. Yeah, I think that's absolutely right. MBS does want to create this city state that drives economic change and reform in his kingdom

and that allows the kingdom to diversify away from oil. But at the same time, he wants to make his mark and he wants to do that in a very, very eye-catching kind of way. MBS was aware that his plans for Nioh and Saudi Arabia were ambitious. He's often said that achieving even half of his ambitions would be a win and transformative for his country. But to achieve even a small percentage of the neon vision would require a massive effort, and huge numbers of people willing to move to a remote corner of the desert to make it all real. That's coming up. Beginning around 2020, hundreds and then thousands of people packed up their lives and moved

to the Saudi desert to deliver Neom, MBS's dream. One of them was Andy. My name is Andy Wirth. And where are you from, Andy Wirth? I live in southwestern Montana, about 45 minutes west of Bozeman, Montana. Andy is an executive in his early 60s. For much of his career, he ran ski resorts, big ones like Squaw Valley and Alpine Meadows near Lake Tahoe.

And yeah, I love skiing. I love snowboarding, alpine skiing, backcountry skiing, Nordic skiing, skate skiing. Quite honestly, Ryan, I've never met a mountain, a horse, a dog or a pair of skis I didn't like. Andy will tell you he's been very fortunate in his career. He's made enough money to only take on projects he really cares about. And in early 2020, he heard about one that seemed to fit that bill. Out of clear blue sky, as Forrest Gump would say, I got this note over LinkedIn,

I think it was, indicating there was some interest in having me come over to Saudi Arabia to work on this project called Neom. What was Neom, as you understood it from this initial pitch? It was an effort to make more progressive the country, usher in a new era, if you will, for that country. I'm not too sure if there's any slogans like make Saudi Arabia great again, but nonetheless, it was a part of the vision that he had as a leader for that country to do many things in northwest Saudi Arabia.

Among the things MBS wanted to do was develop Neom's rocky red mountains. He and his advisors envisioned a luxury mountain destination with hiking, mountain biking, and yes, skiing. Neom wanted to hire Andy to lead the mountain project and develop Saudi Arabia's very first world-class ski resort. What was the issue that first came to your mind? Well, snow. Natural snowfall. It might surprise you to learn that the Saudi mountains do get a dusting of snow in the winter.

Not enough to ski on by a long shot. But to Andy, that wasn't a deal breaker. Andy O'Neill It didn't deter me. It was really intriguing at a call it a strategic level. Aaron Norris But skiing wasn't what convinced Andy to sign on to NEO. Andy O'Neill Honestly, the intrigue of resort development was a bit of a shoulder shrug for me. What was of primary interest and what was really driving me was

having Saudi Arabia oil producing country for generations fund what was ultimately a really remarkable project to demonstrate the value impact of doing now what we should have been doing a generation or two ago on the fight against climate change. That's because Neom aimed to be a 100% renewable energy project. what we should have been doing a generation or two ago on the fight against climate change. That's because NIOAM aimed to be a 100% renewable energy project. And there was a poetic irony in that Saudi Arabia, world's greatest producer of oil,

for generations, that was gonna fund this. One of MBS's goals is to pivot the country away from oil. NIOAM would be part of that. The project would be powered by wind and solar. It would pioneer green hydrogen production. And it would do so on a massive scale. Andy hoped it would be a proof of concept for the world. So I actually was digging on the contrary nature of things.

Counterintuitive, isn't it? He signed on to head Neom's mountain sector. Another person who joined Neom was Tony Harris. So what was the pitch? The pitch for Neom? The pitch for you to join. Oh, Ryan, I mean, very straightforward. You can do whatever you want to do. Tony works in educational consulting.

And in education you are thinking about programs, curriculums, how to make it better? Is that kind of... Yes, I'm thinking about how should we teach, what should we teach, and why should we teach it. It might seem odd that Neal would recruit an educator. After all, it was primarily a massive construction project. But Neal's leaders were looking to the future. If Neal was going to be a world-class city,

it would need world-class schools and experts to help build them. To Tony, Neal's pitch was irresistible. Make up your own job title, make up your own job description, and come and make sure your own job title, make up your own job description, and come and make sure that we are among the foremost education ecosystems in the world. So who wouldn't want that? And let me not be coy with you, they were also paying a huge amount of money. That doesn't hurt. How much money?

The normal rule of thumb was take your highest paying job and add 30% to that. Tony signed on to help run Neom's education sector. His wife, who's also an educator, joined Neom too. Soon they were on a plane headed to Saudi Arabia. They even took their yellow lab, Tanner. They flew to Riyadh, then to Tabuk, before making the two-hour drive to Niom. And what's a drive like? What do you see out the window?

So I don't know when the last time you were in Utah, but it's a little bit like that. It's a desert, not the sort of Lawrence of Arabia desert, but the sort of gravelly stone desert. It's quite mountainous, quite hilly. It's a scrabby place. You don't want to get out of the car. And then you arrive at the camp,

and the very, very first thing that strikes you is it really does look like a forward military base. The camp was encircled by high-security fencing. Inside were row upon row of identical white cabins that kind of looked like mobile homes. This is where Neom's white collar workers lived. And then the other facilities, there was a big communal dining hall. There was a swimming pool, a little gym.

There was a small shop, a barber. Just enough to sort of keep you going. There was also another population of foreign workers at Neom, the laborers who would actually be building this new city. They were mostly from South Asia, and Tony and Andy didn't see much of them. They lived in separate, even more cramped camps.

At Neom, Tony hit the ground running. There was so much pressure to answer some basic questions, I soon found myself rolling up my sleeves and just putting out fires. What curriculum should they use? How many teachers should they hire? Neal's consultants had gotten a head start on some of those questions, like figuring out how big Neal's student population would be. But Tony didn't find much use for their work.

They had come up with this extremely complicated, convoluted Excel model, which would predict the number of kids that we were eventually going to have. We scrapped the whole thing and started all over again, and built a model that actually could predict what we needed and there were 10 other examples of things like that But actually from my perspective this wasn't a problem. I know about startups. I've worked in many startups

I've had a couple of startups myself and this is standard procedure. So this didn't bother me Elsewhere at Neom Andy was also busy problem-solving. Given the lack of snow, Neom's consultants had suggested using a kind of synthetic material to ski on. It almost looked like carpet that could be rolled out along Neom's slopes. It's basically a picture of 14 billion toothbrushes, and that's the slope. I had skied on these kind of slopes, and they're just not very desirable. I saw that as being we're going to have people ski for two hours, and we'll never see them again.

It can work. But what we could do is something that is very creative, I think. What if we actually had real snow? But to figure out if this could work, Andy would need data. Data he didn't have. We didn't have any maps. The good maps you use for this kind of environment are LIDAR. It's basically very detailed, accurate mapping. We were still working with Google Earth, for goodness sakes.

And so Andy threw on his hiking boots to see what he could learn about the region he'd been tasked with developing. I spent a great deal of time on foot up there in the mountains as we were collecting LIDAR-based maps. Hiking, climbing, climbing, hiking. On one of those hikes, Andy stopped by a small radar station operated by the Saudi Air Force. Turns out the staff there collected weather data. So I had ambient temperature measurements every hour going back 25 years and also I had humidity for the same thing and so that was a gold mine. As far as snowmaking went, that data was actually encouraging. There were weeks during the winter when temperatures in Neom's mountains regularly dropped below

freezing, at least for part of the day. That was a surprise and very interesting. Tell people you're building a ski resort in Saudi Arabia, and the eyebrows go up pretty fast. But here was evidence that it could actually work. We were going to be able to ski in the neighborhood of four hours a day between December 10th and March 15th. Skiing might have been 6 a.m. to 10 a.m.

We'd have to make snow every night, every moment possible, and there'd be plenty of times where we wouldn't be able to. But these charts from the Royal Saudi Air Force indicated we could pull this off. It wouldn't come cheap though. Remember, this is the desert. They need to bring in water for snowmaking. Andy also needed these very special and very expensive snowmaking machines designed to create snow in warmer temperatures.

So when you do that math, it is financially not logical. It's in fact irrational. However, when one has access to unlimited capital, we could pull this off and that would be unique and special, so on and so forth. So it was sort of like, this is wild, but it's possible. Yeah. It's really f effing wild, but possible. Andy told us he liked this part of the job. He liked figuring out how to do the impossible, how to ski in the desert.

And there were Andes and Tonys all across Neom, laying plans to suspend stadiums in the air, build green hydrogen plants, desalinate water, build skyscrapers the length of Connecticut. Neal's builders were dreaming big. But standing in between them and execution were massive challenges. Like runaway spending. We couldn't spend money quickly enough. We could not spend money quickly enough. We could not spend money quickly enough.

Bad bosses. It was full-on The Shining, Jack Nicholson type stuff. And the growing realization that all of this might be too expensive for even Saudi Arabia to afford. How would you describe the moment that we're in right now in the Neom story? I think we're sort of in the rapidly colliding with reality phase. That's coming up in part two of our Neom podcast,

Coming Tomorrow. ["Coming Tomorrow"] Before we go, I just want to say that these two Neom episodes will be my last for a while. I'm going out on paternity leave through the summer, but I'll be back on the show in the fall. That's all for today, Friday, April 25th. This episode was produced by Annie Minow and edited by Katherine Brewer. Additional reporting in this episode by Stephen Kalin, Summer Saeed, and Justin Sheck. Fact-checking by Kate Gallagher. The theme remix in today's episode is by Griffin Tanner.

The Journal is a co-production of Spotify and The Wall Street Journal. The show is made by Katherine Brewer, Pia Gadkari, Carlos Garcia, Rachel Humphreys, Sophie Coddner, Pia Gadkari, Carlos Garcia, Rachel Humphries, Sophie Codner, Matt Kwong, Kate Leimbach, Jessica Mendoza, Colin McNulty, Annie Minoff, Laura Morris, Enrique Perez de la Rosa, Sarah Platt, Alan Rodriguez Espinosa, Heather Rogers, Pier Singhy, Jeevika Verma, Lisa Wang, Katherine Whalen, Tatiana Zamis, and me, Ryan Knutson, with help from Trina Menino. Our engineers are Griffin Tanner, Nathan Singapok, and Peter Leonard.

Our theme music is by So Wiley. Additional music this week by Katherine Anderson, Peter Leonard, Bobby Lord, Emma Munger, Nathan Singapok, Griffin Tanner, So Wiley, Audio Network, Blue Dot Sessions, and Epidemic Sound. Additional fact-checking this week by Mary Mathis. Thanks for listening. See you tomorrow.