“I joined because, in my working career, no one has ever said, ‘Do you fancy setting up a semi-autonomous state using your passion as a tool for positive social change?’ ” Paterson explains. Three years in, she’s one of the longest-serving employees. Jan Paterson, a British-Canadian who heads planning for Neom’s “sports sector,” says she wants her grandchildren to grow up in the city, which she hopes will be the most physically active urban center in the world. Many staffers seem to have genuinely bought into that message. Wirth resigned in August 2020, five months into the job.
“We were hanging buildings on the side of cliffs, and we didn’t even know the geology.” He decided faster than most that his No. 2 bucket was overflowing. (Loosely based on novels by Isaac Asimov, it tells the story of a mathematician’s quest to protect human knowledge from the collapse of a dying galactic empire, whose three genetically identical monarchs live in a sprawling palace while their subjects toil below ground.) “We couldn’t even estimate the build cost,” Wirth says.
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It was a landscape that might have been lifted from Foundation, an Apple TV+ series set thousands of years in the future that MBS has said he enjoys. The Vault, an adjacent hotel and residential development, would occupy a man-made canyon, essentially “a massive open-pit mine,” Wirth says. The resort plans called for building an artificial lake, which would require blowing up large portions of the landscape. But Wirth soon grew alarmed by the environmental implications. Temperatures sometimes dip below freezing on the region’s higher mountaintops with enough snow-making equipment, it could be possible to facilitate a winter ski season.
The idea is slightly less absurd than it sounds. Wirth, the American hospitality executive, was hired to work on a particularly expensive project: a Neom ski resort. He also delivered a clear message: Neom would go on no matter what. According to Rossant, who was in attendance, MBS described Khashoggi’s death as a “tragedy” that should never have occurred. At the second gathering of the Future Investment Initiative, held three weeks after Khashoggi was killed, he hosted some of the remaining advisory board members for a late-night audience at his palace. Among others, the British architect Norman Foster, former Y Combinator President Sam Altman, and ex-US Secretary of Energy Ernest Moniz all left the Neom advisory board. But the ensuing outrage cast a pall over foreign investment in Saudi Arabia, and many businesspeople cut ties with the kingdom-and with Neom. A US intelligence assessment found that MBS likely ordered the writer and government critic’s murder the crown prince denied any involvement.
Less than a year after MBS declared his intentions for Neom, the Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi walked into Saudi Arabia’s consulate in Istanbul and never walked out. Neom appears to be one of the crown prince’s highest priorities, and the Saudi state is devoting immense resources to making it a reality. They’ll benefit from cutting-edge infrastructure and a regulatory system designed expressly to foster new ideas-as long as those ideas don’t include challenging the authority of MBS. Yet, according to MBS and his advisers, it will soon be home to millions of people who’ll live in harmony with the environment, relying on desalination plants and a fully renewable electric grid. The chosen site in Saudi Arabia’s far northwest, stretching from the sun-scorched Red Sea coast into craggy mountain badlands, has summer temperatures over 100F and almost no fresh water. An internal Neom “style catalog” viewed by Bloomberg Businessweek includes elevators that somehow fly through the sky, an urban spaceport, and buildings shaped like a double helix, a falcon’s outstretched wings, and a flower in bloom. Gray had signed on to a city-building exercise so ambitious that it verges on the fantastical.