Nadhmi al-Nasr, a Saudi chemical engineer, has led the project since 2018.
According toreporting from The Wall Street Journal, hes left the project and no one is quite sure why.
Neom is the wild dream of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.
A sign in a window of the NEOM pop-up store on the closing day of the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland, on Friday, Jan. 20, 2023.© Stefan Wermuth/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Its set to cost $500 billion.
Nasr was in charge of this grand project until today.
Now, Saudi Arabias sovereign wealth fund, the Public Investment Fund (PIF) is taking over.
Things have been going wrong at Neom for a long time.
The grand scope of the project would be too much for any country to bear.
Central to the project is The Line, a linear super-city originally conceived to house 9 million residents.
Its been hard to build and planners have repeatedly scaled down the ambition of the project.
Around 100,000 workers currently live in make-work cities in Neom, many of them building The Line.
Nasr was a cruel taskmaster, according to reports.
I drive everybody like a slave, he said in aleaked recording of a meeting.
When they drop down dead, I celebrate.
Thats how I do my projects.
Around 21,000 people have, indeed, dropped dead while working in Neom.
It said that tens of thousands have died there.
The Hindustan Times estimated that around 100,000 more havegone missing.
Costs are also reported to have skyrocketed.
Costs fluctuate over time.
Critics have set the cost at $2 trillion, four times the initial $500 billion pitch.
Saudi Arabias PIF only has $1 trillion to play with.
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