Why The Gulf States Are Always Building Big Dumb Mega Projects

Saudi Arabia announced it was going to build a mirrored wall across the desert. A hundred and five miles long. Five hundred metres tall — higher than the Empire State Building, for a hundred and five miles. Nine million people living inside it. No cars, no roads, no streets. They called it The Line. It sits inside NEOM, a five-hundred-billion-dollar city on the Red Sea coast. As of this year, The Line has been reported put on hold until after 2030. Contracts at NEOM have been cancelled. What exists on the ground is a construction trench and some foundations. And this is not unusual. This is the standard output of the Gulf. An indoor ski slope in a desert city where it hits fifty degrees outside. An artificial island shaped like a palm tree, visible from space. The tallest building in the world, in a country with more desert than people. A set of islands arranged to look like a map of the world, most of which sat empty for a decade. Looked at one way, this is the most expensive vanity in human history — rulers signing off on monuments to themselves with money that came out of the ground. And that reading is wrong. Not because the projects are sensible. Several of them genuinely are not, and some will never be finished. It is wrong because it assumes the buildings are the point. By the end of this video you will understand what these projects are actually recruiting, why the tourism story everyone repeats does not survive contact with a calculator, and why the Gulf is racing a clock that has nothing to do with when the oil physically runs out.