When your megacity costs balloon to 25 times your country’s annual budget, you know something’s gone spectacularly wrong. Saudi Arabia’s The Line—originally pitched as a 170-kilometer mirror-wrapped linear city for 9 million residents—officially hit the brakes in September 2025 after burning through $50 billion on what amounts to a very expensive trench in the desert.
Internal documents revealed deliberate financial manipulation and impossible cost projections.
The Wall Street Journal obtained…
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Saudi Mirror™ is a news aggregating site that aims to reflect the The Line, a linear smart city under construction in NEON, Saudi Arabia. The city is envisioned to accommodate nine million residents within 170-kilometer-long, 500-meter-high, and 200-meter-wide superstructure-city.
