The Saudi consulting market is valued at $3.98 billion in 2025, representing 45 per cent of the entire Gulf Cooperation Council consulting market. The Kingdom is the most lucrative consulting market in the Middle East. It is also the most consequential — because the plans the consultants designed became the projects the Kingdom built, and the projects the Kingdom built became the most expensive collection of cancelled, suspended, and quietly killed construction programmes in the history of sovereign development.
The consulting industry’s role in Vision 2030 is not advisory in the narrow sense. It is architectural — the firms shaped the strategic DNA of the programme. McKinsey designed the 170-kilometre linear city. BCG proposed an artificial moon. The plans were presented to a client — the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia — who had the resources to fund them without the institutional checks to challenge them. The consultants provided the intellectual framework. The sovereign wealth fund provided the capital. The desert provided the physics that proved both wrong.
What follows is the record of every major consulting engagement, what each firm was paid where known, what it delivered, and what accountability it faces for plans that cost billions and produced nothing.
McKinsey: The Ministry of McKinsey
McKinsey and Company is NEOM’s principal strategy consultant. The firm earns more than $130 million per year from its NEOM engagement, according to DeSmog’s October 2024 reporting. Over nine years, the cumulative bill likely exceeds $1 billion. The engagement is, by any measure, one of the largest single-client consulting relationships in the firm’s history.
But NEOM is not McKinsey’s only Saudi engagement. It is the most visible element of a relationship so deep that the Saudi Planning Ministry earned the internal nickname “the Ministry of McKinsey.” From 2011 to 2016, McKinsey carried out nearly 600 projects in Saudi Arabia. In 2016 alone — while simultaneously executing 64 contracts for the US government — the firm ran 137 projects in the Kingdom. Its consultants “all but assumed the role of government officials.”
The dual role raises the first structural question: when a consulting firm is simultaneously advising the US government and the Saudi government, whose interests does it serve? The question became acute after the October 2018 murder of Jamal Khashoggi, when McKinsey continued to accept Saudi government contracts despite international pressure on institutions to distance themselves from the Kingdom. Foster left the NEOM advisory board. McKinsey did not leave anything.
The question became more acute in 2024, when McKinsey and BCG defied a subpoena from the US Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, telling senators that Saudi officials would not allow them to discuss their work. Heads of both firms told US lawmakers that their employees in Saudi Arabia could face jail if they disclosed details of their engagements. The confidentiality is not merely contractual. It is, according to the firms themselves, legally coercive — enforced by the threat of imprisonment in the jurisdiction where the work is performed.
An unnamed minister told researchers that Saudi ministries had “outsourced their brains” and lacked “a cadre to keep it sustainable.” The assessment captures the dependency: the Saudi government paid McKinsey to design its strategy, to staff the implementation of its strategy, and then to audit the strategy it had designed and implemented. The firm was architect, builder, and inspector of the same intellectual structure. The conflict of interest is so fundamental that it would not survive a five-minute discussion in any regulated professional context.
The NEOM Audit: Marking Its Own Homework
The internal audit that revealed The Line’s true cost — $8.8 trillion and 2080 for completion — was prepared with McKinsey’s assistance. The audit found “evidence of deliberate manipulation” by “certain members of management” who relied on “unrealistically positive assumptions” to justify cost overruns. Revenue estimates were inflated to cover rising costs: a boutique hiking hotel room repriced in projections from $489 to $1,866 per night; an “inventive glamping” site from $216 to $794.
McKinsey’s spokesman stated the firm “abides by international business rules” and is not involved in “manipulation of financial reporting.” The statement addresses the legal question. It does not address the commercial question: whether the firm’s fee structure — which scales with the scope and ambition of the plan — created an incentive to validate scope that a disinterested advisor would have challenged.
The incentive arithmetic is straightforward. A $500 billion project requires more consulting than a $50 billion project. McKinsey’s fees scale with the plan’s ambition. The plan was very ambitious. The fees were commensurate. A firm that earns $130 million per year from a client whose defining characteristic is unrealistic ambition has a financial incentive to validate ambition and a financial disincentive to constrain it. McKinsey did not force Saudi Arabia to build a 170-kilometre city. It helped Saudi Arabia believe that a 170-kilometre city was buildable. The city was not buildable. The fees were collected regardless.
Reports have circulated that McKinsey has been blacklisted by PIF — though this has not been officially confirmed and the specific reasons are attributed to NEOM’s cost-versus-return problems. Whether the blacklisting, if real, represents accountability or merely the client’s dissatisfaction with outcomes that the consultant validated is a question the firm’s confidentiality agreements prevent anyone from answering.
BCG: The Artificial Moon
Boston Consulting Group was involved in designing the Vision 2030 economic blueprint. The Wall Street Journal obtained 2,300 pages of leaked documents from the consultancies involved in NEOM’s planning — McKinsey, BCG, and Oliver Wyman. The documents revealed the intellectual environment in which the plans were conceived.
BCG proposed partnering with NASA to create an artificial moon — “the biggest in the world.” The proposal was presented to NEOM’s leadership as a viable component of the project’s entertainment and tourism strategy. Other proposals documented in the leaked pages include: robot dinosaurs on a Jurassic Park-style island, glowing desert sand, flying taxis, human genetic modification clinics, android cage-fighting, and 24/7 surveillance systems. The Crown Prince himself was quoted in the documents: “I don’t want any roads or pavements. We are going to have flying cars in 2030!”
The leaked documents describe a planning process in which no idea was too fantastical to propose, validate, and bill for. The consultants were not operating in a culture of intellectual discipline. They were operating in a culture of royal enthusiasm — a client who wanted the impossible and an advisory industry whose business model is to tell clients that the impossible is merely expensive.
BCG’s specific fee amounts from Saudi engagements have not been publicly disclosed. BCG consulting heads were summoned before the US Congress in 2024 to disclose details of their Saudi financial relationships. The testimony, like McKinsey’s, was constrained by the firms’ stated concern that disclosure could result in imprisonment of their Saudi-based staff.
The Other Firms
Oliver Wyman was part of the 2,300-page leaked NEOM documents alongside McKinsey and BCG. The firm expanded its Saudi practice by 40 per cent in 2024 and acquired Booz Allen Hamilton’s MENA consulting business to strengthen regional capabilities. Oliver Wyman advises Saudi Aramco on big data and AI and the Saudi Data and AI Authority on generative AI. The firm named Abdulelah AlBarrak as head of its Riyadh office.
PwC / Strategy& — PwC’s strategy arm — provides advisory services across the Vision 2030 programme. PIF temporarily banned PwC from new advisory contracts through approximately February 2026 after PwC allegedly attempted to poach a top auditor from NEOM. The ban did not extend to PwC’s auditing services, and the firm signed memoranda of understanding with the Saudi Digital Government Authority and the Institute of Public Administration at LEAP 2023.
Deloitte faced a two-year ban from auditing listed companies in Saudi Arabia following the Mohammad Al-Mojil Group scandal — the construction firm that collapsed owing 2.6 billion riyals in unpaid wages to thousands of workers. The audit failure that Deloitte’s ban addressed was financial. The human failure that the audit should have caught — a construction company so mismanaged that 21,000 workers were left without wages — was not within the ban’s scope.
The Business Model
The management consulting industry operates on a business model that separates advice from consequences. The consultant designs the plan. The client implements the plan. If the plan succeeds, the consultant claims credit. If the plan fails, the consultant is not liable — the failure is attributed to implementation, market conditions, or the client’s execution, not to the advice that shaped the strategy.
This separation works when the client has institutional capacity to evaluate the advice — when a CEO, a board, or a parliament can challenge the consultant’s assumptions and reject the recommendations that do not survive scrutiny. In Saudi Arabia, the institutional capacity to challenge is structurally absent. The Crown Prince approves the investments. PIF is chaired by the Crown Prince. The projects carry his imprimatur. The consulting firms advise the Crown Prince. The cycle is closed: the advisor validates the client’s ambitions, the client funds the advisor’s recommendations, and no independent institution — no parliament, no free press, no judicial review — has the authority or the safety to say that the plan is unbuildable.
Bent Flyvbjerg, the Oxford academic who is the most cited scholar globally on megaproject planning, identifies what he calls the “economic sublime” — the economic opportunities that megaprojects create for construction companies, consultants, banks, investors, and workers. The sublime creates systemic incentives to promote projects regardless of feasibility because every participant in the supply chain profits from the project’s existence, whether or not it succeeds. Flyvbjerg documents a systematic pattern: proponents “intentionally misrepresenting information and deliberately disregarding risks.”
Flyvbjerg is himself an external advisor to McKinsey — a detail that illustrates the consulting industry’s capacity to absorb its own critics into its commercial structure. The academic who identifies the pathology advises the firm that exhibits it. The intellectual circle closes as neatly as the commercial one.
The Accountability Question
No consulting firm has faced legal consequences for its role in designing Vision 2030’s unbuildable projects. The $573 million opioid settlement and the $650 million DOJ deferred prosecution agreement demonstrate that McKinsey can be held accountable when its advice contributes to specific, measurable harm in a jurisdiction with functional enforcement. The death of a tribal member, the imprisonment of a teenager for tweets, and the death of 21,000 workers on projects McKinsey helped design have not produced equivalent accountability — because the harm occurred in Saudi Arabia, where the government that hired the consultants is the same government that controls the courts.
The EU Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive, taking effect for the largest companies from 2029, will create a legal framework in which European consulting firms’ involvement in projects documented as involving human rights abuses could carry civil liability. Whether the Directive’s provisions will be applied to advisory services — as opposed to construction, manufacturing, or supply chain activities — is untested. The consulting industry’s argument that it provides advice, not products, may or may not survive the Directive’s broad definition of “value chain.”
The accountability gap is the consulting industry’s most valuable commercial asset. McKinsey earned $130 million per year. BCG proposed an artificial moon. Oliver Wyman expanded by 40 per cent. PwC was banned for poaching, not for advising. Deloitte was banned for audit failure, not for failing to detect wage theft. The fees were paid in full. The plans were not built. The workers were not paid. And the consulting industry — the industry that designed the plans that were not built, that validated the budgets that were not met, that staffed the institutions that did not deliver — has not returned a single dollar of the billions it earned for work that the desert proved impossible.
The Saudi consulting market will reach $5.05 billion by 2030. The growth projection assumes continued government spending on advisory services. The assumption is correct: the Kingdom will continue to hire consultants. It will hire them to design the next set of plans. Whether those plans are buildable will depend on whether the consultants have learned anything from the plans that were not — or whether the fee structure, the confidentiality agreements, and the absence of accountability will produce the same results, at the same cost, in the same desert.
This analysis draws on DeSmog’s investigation of McKinsey NEOM fees (October 2024); the Wall Street Journal’s 2,300-page leaked document reporting; TechCrunch’s McKinsey reporting (March 2025); Irish Times and Responsible Statecraft (Senate subpoena and jail threats); Consultancy-ME and CBC (BCG artificial moon, leaked proposals); AGBI (PwC ban); the Mohammad Al-Mojil Group audit failure (Deloitte ban); Mordor Intelligence (Saudi consulting market valuation); Oliver Wyman practice expansion; ProPublica (McKinsey ICE investigation); NPR and CNBC (McKinsey opioid settlements); Bent Flyvbjerg’s megaproject research (Oxford/SAGE Journals); and the EU Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (Directive 2024/1760). Vision2030.AI is editorially independent and is not affiliated with McKinsey, BCG, Oliver Wyman, PwC, Deloitte, PIF, or any official Vision 2030 entity.