Sources tell the Wall Street Journal that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed Bonesaw’s plan to build The Line, a pair of 1,600 ft tall, 106 mile skyscrapers stretching across a deeply inhospitable region of his country’s desert wasteland is running into certain difficulties and may end up breaking both its target completion date of 2080 and its cost estimate of $8.8 trillion if things don’t change soon.
The bummer of an outlook on hitting those goals comes from the fact that $50 billion has already been spent and all they have to show for it is a golf resort at one end of “Neom,” the futuristic cyberpunk metropolis inspired by Bonesaw’s love of sci-fi and video games, of which The Line is intended to be the centerpiece. The centerpiece of The Line is “The Chandelier” described by the Journal as “essentially an empty glass building more than 30 stories tall – is planned to hang upside down from a giant steel bridge in the Line. It was designed by Marvel film designer Olivier Pron, who was brought in because staff knew the prince liked his movies, some of the former employees said.”
Neom execs were hoping to have at least 10 miles of The Line built by 2030, which the Journal estimates equivalent to constructing three times the square footage of all office space in Midtown Manhattan in five years – plus the multiple theaters and amusement parks suspended in between The Line’s skyscrapers. Burdened by expenses from not getting all this shit built, pencil pushers involved with the project have taken to boosting the “internal rate of return.” For example, fees for an “inventive glamping” site that hasn’t been built yet were readjusted to $704 a night, up from $216, ahead of a big presentation to potential investors. New York-based consultancy McKinsey helped them come up with that idea as a value-add to their $145 million fee for overseeing the project.