The Saudi project to build a city of the future in the desert makes people happy

Unveiled in July 2022, the latest plans for Neom, the city that by 2030 is set to become the flagship project of a modernized, out-of-all-oil Saudi Arabia, got the whole planet outcrying. Laugh or rage… Renamed The Line, the car-free city will take place in two parallel buildings that are 170 km (!), 200 m wide and 500 m high.

piece of desert

The images of architects straight out of a video game are as absurd as the promises of a city of 9 million people, with luxurious and carbon-neutral housing, with a plethora of robotic services and other flying taxis. Budget: between 320 and 500 billion dollars (as many euros). Clarification: Neom is just a piece of desert in the north-west of the country at the moment, where the power is forcibly expelling the Bedouins who live there.

Also read: Brutal evictions in Saudi Arabia for the pharaonic project of “modernizing” Jeddah

Location map of Saudi Arabia. | WESTERN FRANCE

But the main thing is to pretend to please Crown Prince Mohamed ben Salmane, whose toy is Neom. And get insane wages. The Wall Street Journal has gotten its hands on the salaries of the top executives responsible for overseeing the project, almost all of them non-Saudi. We are happily exceeding millions of dollars a year, well above what is practiced in the 3,000 largest companies listed in the United States, specifies the American business daily.

We push

For this reason we jostle at the gate. Peter Terium, ex-CEO of major German energy group RWE, Dirk Van Schependom, ex-CEO of British accounting firm KPMG, Tim Shorrocks, ex-Amazon, Joseph Bradley, ex-Cisco…

The rest of the pay scale is consistent. An average engineer makes more than $130,000 a year. And yet Neom struggles to retain its staff, many staff quickly growing weary of a machine running empty and dropping the case after hitting the jackpot.

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