By 2030, development was planned in stages to ultimately cover a stretch of 170 kilometers of coastal desert and house 1.5 million people.
However, an unnamed official told Bloomberg on 5 April that the project would be scaled back to 2.4 kilometers, with a reduced capacity of less than 300,000 residents.
Comment: So it'll essentially be another skysraper-esque building in the desert?
"The pullback on The Line comes as the kingdom's sovereign wealth fund has yet to approve Neom's budget for 2024," Bloomberg writes, citing unnamed sources familiar with the matter. "It shows that the financial realities of the trillions of dollars of investment are starting to cause concern at the highest levels of the Saudi government as it tries to fulfill its ambitious Vision 2030 program, the overarching initiative tasked with diversifying the kingdom's economy."
Comment: One wonders whether this scaling back has something to do with the, overall, rapidly deteriorating global economic situation: US at risk of 'delayed recession', says analyst who predicted 2008 crash
For an idea as to why it was so widely ridiculed, see: