Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman — widely known as MBS — launched Vision 2030 a decade ago with extraordinary ambition. The plan promised to transform the Kingdom through jaw-dropping megaprojects, funded by a sovereign wealth fund worth nearly $1 trillion. The idea was bold: use oil wealth to build a future that no longer needed oil.
The centrepiece was Neom, a $500 billion development in the north-west of the country. Its most iconic element was The Line — a city unlike anything the world had seen. It looks like The Line, which was meant to redefine the concept of a city as it stretched ramrod straight across more than 100 miles of untapped land, is being turned into something considerably more prosaic. The mountain resort of Trojena, pitched as a year-round ski destination in the desert kingdom, has also been scaled back. The Asian Winter Games it was meant to host in 2029 have been cancelled and relocated to Kazakhstan. And The Cube — a $50 billion structure so vast it could have contained the Empire State Building twenty times over — has been scrapped entirely.
So what went wrong? Oil prices dropped sharply before the current Middle East conflict, hitting Saudi revenues hard. But there is a deeper problem. The influx of foreign investment in these hyper-expensive visionary projects has never materialised to the degree on which the Saudis had been banking. Without that outside capital, the numbers simply do not add up.
LIV Golf — the Kingdom's audacious attempt to dominate global sport — has also been reassessed as a costly failure, burning through roughly $5 billion with little financial or reputational return.
Some analysts see a familiar pattern. Author Ellen Wald points out that Saudi Arabia has a long history of making 'splashy' announcements that either never get built or are quietly downscaled. A similar push to diversify the economy through new cities under a previous monarch also fell flat despite billions in spending. The question now is whether this moment represents a sensible recalibration — or simply the latest chapter in a recurring cycle of overpromising and underdelivering.
