It is absurd. The kind of absurd that only happens when you have more money than sense.
Saudi Arabia has been dumping unprecedented amounts of cash into tourism and economic diversification. I’ve been watching. Most people have too. It’s the biggest planned project in history, and history loves to laugh at projects this size. Usually they fail. Spectacularly.
Now The Line is facing its hardest moment yet. It’s not just slowed down. It’s stopped. Reportedly, for years.
Two Skyscrapers or One Delusion?
To get to the stop, we have to look at the go. Or the supposed go.
NEOM is the umbrella project, a $1.5 trillion bucket of money trying to become a city. The Line is the face of NEOM. It is the wildest bit of urban planning I’ve ever seen. The original pitch? Nineteen million people living inside a linear strip. AI run. Car free. Zero carbon.
Seventeen hundred kilometers long. Two mirrored skyscrapers standing side by side. Each as tall as the Empire State Building and stretching as far as the width of Delaware. You would live inside the buildings.
It looked like a video game level. I said this before. I still say it. How do you fit that much human activity into that geometry? It seemed impossible then. Now it feels even more so.
The design was unlike anything we’ve ever seen, mostly because engineering usually obeys some form of reality.
There are other bits in NEOM. Marina resorts. Ski slopes in the desert. All of it futuristic. All of it expensive. If this works, Saudi Arabia’s economic pivot looks like a genius move. If it fails? Embarrassment. Global scale embarrassment.
And here we are.
The Math Doesn’t Work Anymore
It wasn’t always this quiet. Back in May 2024 The Wall Street Journal broke the first real news. The Line was bloated. Over budget. The goals shrank.
By 2030 they expected a 2.4-kilometer line. That was it. A mere 1.4% of the promised length.
Population goals? Cut from 1.5 million to 200,0 deserts. That’s 13% of the target.
At the time the crown was shiny. Saudi Arabia claimed the long-term vision was intact. Just slower. Sure. Just keep telling yourself that.
The $1.5 trillion price tag is staggering. For context the country’s entire Public Investment Fund (PIF) sits just under $1 trillion. The Line costs more than the fund itself. Even with oil money it’s a stretch. And that was the best case. Estimates suggest it could hit $2 trillion.
That’s a lot of zeros.
Pause Button Hit
Now Semafor reports construction has stopped. Completely.
Work won’t restart until after 2030.
Think about the year. Vision 2030. That was the deadline. The horizon line. Now the line itself is delayed past the horizon. The PIF is shifting priorities. Ports. Data centers. Boring stuff that makes money instead of shiny stuff that loses it.
It’s not just the linear city. The rest of NEOM is bleeding time too. Trojena? The ski resort meant for the 2029 Asian Games? No work expected until post-2030 either.
If it ever starts again it’ll look different. Simpler. Less “twin mirror god towers” and more “buildable infrastructure.” But when? And who pays?
Who Pays the Bill?
Here’s the kicker.
The economics of the whole region hinge on population. Solar panels. Desalination plants. Massive airports. Infrastructure that needs users to justify its existence.
If you spread that cost across 1.5 million people maybe the math breathes.
With 200k? The unit cost per resident skyrockets. It makes no sense. The sustainability argument collapses under its own weight.
I often get asked why I write about this. Why focus on Saudi Arabia?
It’s not endorsement. Curiosity is not consent. We are watching an unprecedented experiment in state-funded futurism. We also saw Riyadh Air launch. New hotels popping up like mushrooms after rain.
But The Line? This feels like a hard limit.
I’ve been fascinated and skeptical since day one. I wanted it to work just to prove physics could bend that way. Now we watch the scaffolding rust.
It will remain to be seen whether this is a permanent pause or a prelude to a very different project. The mirrors are dark now. The silence is loud.
Does the kingdom rebuild? Or does the dream dissolve into the desert sand?
Only time tells.
