Why Saudi Arabia Is Burning $500,000,000,000 in the Desert

Saudi Arabia promised the world a $500,000,000,000 city of the future: a mirrored building taller than the Empire State Building, stretching the distance from Los Angeles to San Diego, housing nine million people. Nine years later, what exists is a 1.5 mile trench in the Tabuk desert, a $4,000,000,000 island resort with no guests, and a five year budget that sets aside more money to cancel contracts than to build. This is the full story of NEOM and The Line: the 2017 Ritz-Carlton announcement, the internal audit that priced the real vision at $8,800,000,000,000, the hotel room repriced from $489 to $1,866 a night to keep the spreadsheets happy, the tribe that paid the price for the land, and the forgotten Saudi mega-city from 2005 that predicted this exact ending. Then the honest question: could America do this? California's high-speed rail says more than you'd think. What's in this video: The night NEOM was announced, and what happened at that hotel eleven days later Why a linear city fails mathematically: the 20 minute train that needs to break the world speed record, and the peer-reviewed case that a line is the worst shape for a city The Public Investment Fund machine: how oil money became mirror renderings King Abdullah Economic City: the dress rehearsal nobody remembers The six-stage collapse, from unapproved budgets to the $16,000,000,000 cancellation bill Vision 2030's numbers that actually worked, and the American mirror: two opposite ways megaprojects fail CHAPTERS 0:00 The Ballroom Promise 5:07 The $8.8 Trillion Audit 8:11 King Abdullah's Ghost City 9:58 The Six-Stage Collapse 13:18 Could America Do This? #NEOM #TheLine #SaudiArabia #Megaprojects #Infrastructure