“We live in a time of mad kings, megalomaniacal sociopaths granted dangerous power through wealth and/or political position, prone to wild schemes of empire and grandeur”

After quoting Jamal Khashoggi from 2017:

Let’s talk about something other than women driving. The NEOM project, the futuristic city that he (the crown prince) plans to invest half a trillion dollars in. What if it goes wrong? It could bankrupt the country.

Palko writes:

“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!” — Neom was just the beginning for MBS

As mentioned before, we live in a time of mad kings, megalomaniacal sociopaths granted dangerous power through wealth and/or political position, prone to wild schemes of empire and grandeur. Even in this crowded field, the ruler of Saudi Arabia manages to stand out, particularly with his willingness to burn through even the impressive coffers of his country building futuristic boondoggles.

He’s like a self-funding Elon Musk.

He then quotes Nadeen Ebrahim and Dalya Al Masri:

At the heart of the project is the “Mukaab,” a 400-meter (1,312-foot) high, 400-meter wide and 400-meter-long cube that is big enough to fit 20 Empire State buildings. . . . due to be completed in 2030.

… “Back in the day, you would have negative discussions about Saudi Arabia affiliated to human rights abuses,” said Andreas Krieg, research fellow at the King’s College London Institute of Middle Eastern Studies. “But now they’re trying to push new narratives of being a country of development and one that can build futuristic cities.”

… But some have questioned whether the project will even come to fruition. Saudi Arabia has announced similar mega projects in the past, work on which has been slow.

In 2021, MBS announced his $500 billion futuristic Neom city in the northwest of the country, with promises of robot maids, flying taxis, and a giant artificial moon. And last year, he unveiled a giant linear city, the Line, which aimed to stretch over 106 miles and house 9 million people. …

“The more absurd and futuristic these projects get, the more I can’t help but imagine how much more dystopian everything surrounding them will be,” wrote Dana Ahmed, a Gulf researcher at Amnesty International, on Twitter.

Saudi officials have insisted that work on the projects is going ahead as planned.

It’s hard to know how to think about this. Is the ruler of Saudi Arabia as clueless as the Axios journalists who wrote, “Tesla CEO Elon Musk has unveiled a video of his Boring Company’s underground tunnel that will soon offer Los Angeles commuters an alternative mode of transportation.” That was “soon” in 2018!

OK, no reason to think the authors of that linked article were clueless. They could well have been crazy like a fox, aiming for a lucrative job in public relations. Putting out an article with such a stupid claim, that’s a commitment device demonstrating a real willingness to continue to write and publish ridiculous things in the future.

Anyway, yeah, they “have insisted that work on the projects is going ahead as planned.” If you take that statement literally, it doesn’t actually say it will be completed in 2030. Yes, it’s “due to be completed in 2030,” but that doesn’t mean that is their plan. The actual plan could well be for the project to be overdue: a much smaller thing to be completed many years later.

Kind of like that dude who owes Defector $500,000. I mean, sure, he said he “would back them with $500,000,” but people say all sorts of things, right?

There’s nothing special about rich people here. All of us make plans that we ultimately can’t carry out. I have lots of ideas for books that, realistically, I’ll never get around to writing. With rich people, the plans can just be bigger, also it’s worth journalists’ while to promote rich people’s ideas, in the hope that some of the money will splash off onto them, or just through some sort of generalized worship of money and success. Bankrupting a country, though, that seems more serious than just circulating stupid graphs.