Saudis Go Beyond Oil

Businessmen and social media influencers will converge upon an island paradise this weekend, but it won’t be in Ibiza.

The Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has invited the who’s who of finance and entertainment to join him in Neom, a 10,200 square-mile area in the northwest of the kingdom that is being rapidly transformed into a multi-city conurbation in an attempt to modernize and open the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) to westerners like never before.

The beach party will take place at the Sindalah island resort, just one of the several regional projects that could cost the Kingdom up to $1.5 trillion to build. The Saudis are also constructing a luxury winter resort called Trojena, an industrial port-city named Oxagon, and a 105-mile long hypermodern city named “The Line,” a mirrored metropolis that will house up to 9 million people. 

The immense scope of construction and the eye-watering costs are all part of Vision 2030, bin Salman’s big bet on diversifying the Kingdom’s economy away from its reliance on the production of fossil fuel and potentially unlocking KSA as a new cultural hub in a part of the world that isn’t often associated with leisure. 

The beach party will take place days ahead of the Future Investment Initiative Institute conference scheduled in the country’s capital of Riyadh from October 29-31. Citadel’s Ken Griffin, BlackRock’s Larry Fink, the London Stock Exchange’s Julia Hogged, and Goldman Sachs’s David Solomon are all expected to attend the investment forum, where nearly $18 billion worth of deals were struck during the 2023 edition. This year, organizers expect more than $28 billion in deals to be announced. 

As with other projects in the region, controversy over working conditions has dogged the builds. An estimated 21,000 migrant workers have died during construction of the resorts and an ex-intelligence officer told the BBC earlier this year that Saudi forces had been instructed “to kill” local villagers who protested the construction of The Line. More than 6,000 people have been removed from the area to make way for the futuristic eco-city without cars which is being built by dozens of Western companies. When completed, it will stand taller than the Eiffel Tower of Paris and cover the length of Wilmington, Delaware to New York City.

If The Line is bin Salman’s vision for a cultural reimagining of the Kingdom, Oxagon is his vision for a new economic hub in the region. Located off the Suez Canal in the Arabian Peninsula, The octagon-shaped city will house 90,000 people and act as a floating trading hub connecting the Maritime Silk Road and the incoming India-Middle East-Europe economic corridor. The projects, located at the heart of where Europe, Africa and Asia cross, are estimated to consume 20% of the world’s steel market, much of it sourced from China. 

The new projects are not the only attempt bin Salman is making to open his Kingdom’s door to the West. In recent years, KSA has invested heavily to attract some of the soccer world’s biggest stars, granting massive contracts to luminaries such as Cristiano Ronaldo, Neymar, and Karim Benzema. Ronaldo, who has become the celebrity du jour in the desert country, recently called the Saudi Pro League “one of the best in the world” and said he will likely retire at his club, Al Nassr.

In a recent exchange with Al Arabiya’s Nadia Bilbassy, the former President Donald Trump called bin Salman “a visionary” and touted his leadership. Trump, too, has proposed gigantic new construction projects for the United States. In March of 2023, Trump floated the idea of building 10 new “freedom cities” and recently he has pitched selling off federal land in the Southwest as a solution to America’s housing crisis. 

Despite the innovative plan to connect three continents, the Saudis have struggled to secure outside financing for the dream projects scheduled to be completed by the end of the decade. Bin Salman, taking a page from Field of Dreams, has poured the Kingdom’s wealth into construction—“If you build it, they will come.” Such is the mantra of the Saudi’s old desert made new.