Liam Denning, Columnist

Saudi Arabia's NEOM: Oasis or Sand Castle?

The $500 billion insta-city highlights the Kingdom's reform challenges.

October 24, 2017 at 6:03 PM UTC

Liam Denning is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering energy. A former banker, he edited the Wall Street Journal’s Heard on the Street column and wrote the Financial Times’s Lex column.

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The promotional video for NEOM, Saudi Arabia's proposed $500 billion city of the future announced on Tuesday, errs toward the dreamy and inspirational end of the artistic spectrum. But I couldn't shake the feeling it might also be perfect as the happy prelude to some dystopian movie where society drowns in its own hubris.

NEOM debuted at a conference this week in Riyadh, dubbed "Davos in the desert" and effectively a giant marketing pitch to draw in dollars as part of Saudi Arabia's effort to reform its oil-dependent economy. It manages to be simultaneously ambitious and derivative -- which underscores a central challenge facing the country and the global oil market that depends on it.