McKinsey and Company, the world’s most influential management consulting firm, has earned more than $130 million per year from its engagement with NEOM, according to reporting by DeSmog in October 2024. The engagement has continued since the project’s inception in 2017. Over nine years, the cumulative advisory bill likely exceeds $1 billion — a figure that would make NEOM one of McKinsey’s largest single-client engagements in the firm’s history.
For this fee, McKinsey designed the strategic scope of the project: a 170-kilometre mirrored linear city in the desert, a mountain ski resort where summer temperatures exceed 30 degrees Celsius, a floating industrial platform on the Red Sea, and a broader development zone that was supposed to house 9 million people. McKinsey then assisted with the preparation of the internal audit — reported by the Wall Street Journal in March 2025 — that found the project would cost $8.8 trillion and take until 2080 to complete. The audit also found “evidence of deliberate manipulation” by management, who relied on “unrealistically rosy assumptions” to justify cost overruns.
The dual role — designing the strategy and then auditing the strategy it had designed — is the purest expression of the management consulting business model’s fundamental conflict of interest. McKinsey’s fees scale with the scope of the plan: a $500 billion project requires more consulting than a $50 billion one. The incentive to validate ambitious scope, rather than challenge it, is embedded in the commercial relationship. The firm earns more when the plan is bigger. The plan was very big. The fee was commensurate.
McKinsey’s engagement with Saudi Arabia has been characterised by a level of confidentiality that extends to defying the US Congress. In 2024, McKinsey, along with Teneo, M. Klein and Company, 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 McKinsey and BCG told US lawmakers that their employees in Saudi Arabia could face jail if they disclosed details of their engagements for the sovereign wealth fund. 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.
McKinsey’s spokesman stated that the firm “abides by international business rules” and is not involved in “manipulation of financial reporting.” The statement addresses the narrowest interpretation of the firm’s role and does not address whether McKinsey evaluated the feasibility of the plans it designed, whether it assessed the human rights conditions under which the plans would be executed, or whether the $130 million annual fee includes any obligation to tell the client that the plan cannot be built.
The Role
McKinsey’s role at NEOM was not advisory in the narrow sense of providing analysis on request. It was architectural — the firm shaped the project’s strategic DNA. The original NEOM concept, the sector strategies, the financial projections, the revenue models, and the population targets all bear McKinsey’s methodological fingerprints. The firm was involved in determining what NEOM would be, how large it would be, and what it would cost — the foundational decisions that determined every subsequent engineering, construction, and human resource decision.
This positioning — at the origin point of the project’s strategic identity — means that the outcomes the project has produced are, in part, McKinsey’s outcomes. The 170-kilometre linear city that was scaled to 2.4 kilometres was McKinsey’s 170-kilometre city. The ski resort that was cancelled was McKinsey’s ski resort. The floating platform that was never procured was McKinsey’s floating platform. The $50 billion spent was spent on plans that McKinsey shaped.
The firm would dispute this characterisation. Consulting firms consistently maintain that they provide analysis and recommendations, and that the client makes decisions. The distinction is legally important and practically meaningless. When a consulting firm earns $130 million per year from a single client, the firm’s analysis shapes the client’s decisions — not because the analysis is coercive but because the relationship creates a shared intellectual framework in which the consultant’s assumptions become the client’s assumptions. 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 Audit
The internal audit that McKinsey helped prepare deserves close attention because it reveals what the firm knew — or should have known — about the plans it had helped design.
The audit’s central findings: completing The Line to its original specification would cost $8.8 trillion and would not be finished until 2080. The cost exceeds 25 times Saudi Arabia’s annual government budget. The timeline extends 63 years beyond the original completion date.
The audit found “evidence of deliberate manipulation” by “certain members of management.” Executives had based the business plan on “unrealistically positive assumptions” to justify cost overruns. Revenue estimates were inflated to cover cost increases, artificially sustaining the internal rate of return. Specific examples: a boutique hiking hotel room was repriced in projections from $489 to $1,866 per night; an “inventive glamping” site was repriced from $216 to $794 per night.
McKinsey assisted with the audit. The firm that helped design the projections helped evaluate the projections it had designed. This dual role — architect and auditor of the same plan — is the structural conflict at the centre of the engagement. In financial services, auditing firms are prohibited from providing consulting services to the same client precisely because the dual role creates an irreconcilable conflict of interest. In management consulting, no such prohibition exists. McKinsey was free to design plans, validate plans, and audit plans within a single billable relationship.
The audit’s finding of “deliberate manipulation” raises a question that McKinsey has not publicly answered: was the manipulation conducted using McKinsey’s analytical frameworks? Were the “unrealistically positive assumptions” generated by NEOM management alone, or were they produced within the McKinsey-facilitated planning process? Did McKinsey flag the assumptions as unrealistic at any point during the engagement, and if so, what happened when it did?
McKinsey’s statement that it is not involved in “manipulation of financial reporting” addresses whether the firm committed the manipulation. It does not address whether the firm enabled it, tolerated it, or failed to identify it during the years of engagement that preceded the audit.
The Fee Structure
The $130 million annual fee, sustained over nine years, produces a cumulative total that exceeds $1 billion. The figure places NEOM among the most lucrative single-client consulting engagements in history.
For context: $130 million per year is approximately the annual consulting budget of many sovereign nations. It exceeds the GDP of several Small Island Developing States. It is more than the annual budget of many UN agencies. It is, for a single consulting engagement with a single construction project, extraordinary.
The fee structure of major consulting engagements is typically based on one of three models: a retainer (fixed annual fee for ongoing availability), project-based billing (fees tied to specific deliverables), or a combination. McKinsey’s specific fee arrangement with NEOM has not been publicly disclosed. The $130 million annual figure, reported by DeSmog, suggests a retainer-plus-project model in which the firm provides continuous strategic support supplemented by fees for specific workstreams.
The economic incentive created by this fee structure is straightforward: McKinsey’s revenue from NEOM scales with the project’s scope and complexity. A $500 billion project with multiple sectors, hundreds of strategic questions, and a population target of 9 million generates more consulting demand than a $50 billion project with a port, a hydrogen plant, and an airport. The more ambitious the plan, the more consulting the plan requires. The more consulting the plan requires, the higher McKinsey’s fees.
This incentive structure does not mean McKinsey deliberately inflated NEOM’s scope to increase its fees. It means the incentive to challenge ambitious scope — to tell the client that the 170-kilometre city is unbuildable, that the ski resort is environmentally absurd, that the floating platform is decades beyond current technology — runs directly against the incentive to earn revenue from the client. The conflict is not personal. It is structural. And the structural incentive to validate ambition rather than constrain it is embedded in every dollar of the $130 million annual fee.
The Saudi Practice
McKinsey’s NEOM engagement is not an isolated relationship. The firm has been a principal advisor to the Saudi government across the Vision 2030 programme. 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 — McKinsey ran 137 projects in the Kingdom. The firm’s consultants “all but assumed the role of government officials,” earning the Saudi Planning Ministry the internal nickname “the Ministry of McKinsey.” An unnamed minister told researchers that ministries had “outsourced their brains” and lacked “a cadre to keep it sustainable.” The Saudi consulting market is valued at $3.98 billion in 2025 — representing 45 per cent of the entire GCC consulting market — and McKinsey’s share is the largest single firm allocation.
The breadth of the relationship creates a dynamic in which the firm’s ability to challenge any single element of the programme is constrained by its commercial interest in the programme as a whole. A firm that earns $130 million from NEOM, plus additional fees from other Vision 2030 engagements, has a total Saudi revenue exposure that makes it impractical — commercially, relationally, and institutionally — to deliver the kind of challenging advice that might reduce the scope of any single engagement.
The pattern is not unique to McKinsey or to Saudi Arabia. It is the defining characteristic of the management consulting industry’s relationship with sovereign clients: the larger the relationship, the harder it is to say no. The advisory role becomes an alignment role. The consultant tells the client what the client wants to hear, not because the consultant is dishonest but because the commercial relationship selects for alignment and punishes dissent.
The Broader McKinsey Record
McKinsey’s involvement in NEOM exists within a broader institutional history that includes engagements for which the firm has faced scrutiny, criticism, and legal consequences.
McKinsey advised Purdue Pharma on strategies to boost OxyContin sales during the opioid crisis — targeting high-volume prescribers, crafting messaging to increase prescriptions, and developing methods to circumvent pharmacy restrictions. The firm settled with 47 US states for $573 million in February 2021. In December 2024, McKinsey agreed to a separate $650 million deferred prosecution agreement with the US Department of Justice. Former top partner Martin Elling pleaded guilty to obstruction of justice. Total opioid-related payments now approach $1 billion.
McKinsey held over $20 million in contracts with US Immigration and Customs Enforcement and proposed cutting food, medical care, and supervision at detention facilities — recommendations that were “sometimes too harsh even for” ICE staff, according to ProPublica’s investigation based on 1,500 pages of documents obtained through a FOIA lawsuit. McKinsey ghostwrote a government contracting document justifying a $2.2 million contract extension for itself. Managing Partner Kevin Sneader claimed the firm did no immigration policy work; documents subsequently revealed this was false. The engagement drew criticism from McKinsey’s own employees and ended in July 2018.
McKinsey continued to accept Saudi government contracts after the October 2018 murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi — a decision that other institutions, including Norman Foster’s departure from NEOM’s advisory board, treated as a moral threshold.
The pattern across these engagements is not dishonesty. It is indifference — a business model that treats the ethical context of the client as external to the consulting relationship. McKinsey provides analysis. The client provides the moral framework. If the client’s moral framework includes forced evictions, death sentences for social media posts, and 21,000 worker deaths, that framework is the client’s responsibility, not the consultant’s.
The business model works until someone asks whether the consultant has a responsibility for the outcomes of the advice it provides. McKinsey’s consistent answer has been no — the consultant advises, the client decides. But when the consultant earns $130 million per year and the client spends $50 billion on plans the consultant helped design, the distinction between advising and deciding becomes increasingly semantic. McKinsey shaped the plan. The plan shaped the project. The project produced the outcomes. The outcomes include a displaced tribe, death sentences, and 21,000 dead workers. The fees were the same regardless.
The Question
The question that McKinsey’s NEOM engagement poses is not whether the firm broke any law. It did not. The question is whether the management consulting business model — fees for advice, with no obligation to evaluate the advice’s consequences — is compatible with the human rights obligations that the firm’s own public statements acknowledge.
McKinsey publishes corporate responsibility reports. It employs a Social Responsibility practice. It advises other clients on ethical governance, stakeholder engagement, and responsible business practices. The firm’s institutional identity includes a commitment to creating value that benefits not just its clients but the communities affected by its clients’ decisions.
NEOM’s community includes the Howeitat tribe, five of whose members face execution for opposing the project McKinsey helped design. It includes the 140,000 workers who built the project under conditions that the ILO is investigating as forced labour. It includes the families of the 21,000 who died.
Whether McKinsey conducted any assessment of these human costs, and if so, what it found — and if not, why not — is a question the firm has not been asked in a forum where it is obligated to answer. The $130 million per year buys a great deal of strategic advice. It does not, apparently, buy an obligation to consider what the strategy costs the people who live beneath it.
One billion dollars in fees. Eight point eight trillion dollars to complete. Fifty billion spent. Two-point-four kilometres built. Twenty-one thousand dead. The consultants were paid in full. The workers were not.
This analysis draws on DeSmog’s investigation of McKinsey’s NEOM fees (October 2024); TechCrunch’s reporting on the internal audit and McKinsey’s dual role (March 2025); the Wall Street Journal’s reporting on the $8.8 trillion cost projection; McKinsey’s spokesman’s statement; the firm’s involvement in the Purdue Pharma opioid settlement ($573 million, 2021); the firm’s ICE advisory engagement; the New York Times and ProPublica’s McKinsey investigations; and the management consulting industry’s fee structure and conflict-of-interest literature. Vision2030.AI is editorially independent and is not affiliated with McKinsey and Company, NEOM, PIF, or any official Vision 2030 entity.