In September 2024, the Wall Street Journal published an investigation into the executive culture at NEOM that contained recordings, testimony, and internal documents describing an organisation in which racism, contempt for worker safety, and managerial brutality were not aberrations from the project’s character but expressions of it. The investigation centred on Wayne Borg, an Australian national who had served as NEOM’s Managing Director for Media, Entertainment, Culture and Fashion Industries since September 2019. Before NEOM, Borg had been CEO of Fox Studios Australia, President and General Manager of Fox Studios in Los Angeles, Executive Vice President for International at Universal Pictures, and Deputy CEO of Abu Dhabi’s twofour54 media zone authority. Earlier in his career, he held positions at Warner Bros, Walt Disney Co., PepsiCo, and Unilever. He holds a Master’s degree in Business Leadership from York St John University and completed a leadership programme at Harvard Business School. He was, in every conventional measure, a senior entertainment industry executive with blue-chip credentials.
The investigation expanded to encompass the broader leadership culture under CEO Nadhmi al-Nasr, who had run the project since August 2018. The findings described an organisation where the people building the future city of the future discussed the deaths of construction workers as scheduling inconveniences and classified the workers themselves by race.
The Journal’s investigation was based on multiple audio recordings of Borg’s statements, testimony from current and former NEOM employees, internal documentation including medical reports from the 100,000-plus worker site, and corporate communications. NEOM’s response was that “protecting welfare is a top priority.” The gap between the statement and the evidence is the subject of this article.
The Quotes
The specificity of Wayne Borg’s documented statements removes the possibility of misinterpretation. They were not ambiguous. They were not taken out of context. They were direct expressions of a worldview that assigned human value by race and treated worker deaths as administrative friction.
Three manual workers died on a NEOM project — the circumstances involved a falling pipe, a wall collapse, and mishandled explosives. Borg’s response, documented by the Wall Street Journal: “A whole bunch of people die so we’ve got to have a meeting on a Sunday night.”
The sentence contains the entirety of the executive response to three deaths. The deaths are reduced to “a whole bunch of people die” — an event described with the register of someone noting that the catering was late, not that human beings had been killed. The inconvenience is not the deaths but the meeting they necessitated. And the temporal detail — “on a Sunday night” — specifies that the disruption to his weekend was the salient fact, not the loss of three lives.
On the subject of worker deaths more broadly, Borg stated: “You can’t train for stupidity.” The sentence assigns responsibility for workplace fatalities to the dead — an inversion so complete that it renders safety systems, engineering controls, and employer obligations irrelevant. If workers die because they are stupid, then the employer has no obligation to prevent their deaths. The deaths are not failures of the system. They are consequences of the workers’ inherent deficiency.
On South Asian migrant workers — the men who constituted the overwhelming majority of NEOM’s 140,000-strong construction workforce — Borg described them as “f—ing morons.” He stated: “That is why white people are at the top of the pecking order.” He elaborated: “The white blokes are at the top of the tree.”
The racial hierarchy was not implicit. It was articulated as an explanation for an organisational structure in which white Western executives made decisions and brown South Asian workers carried them out, were injured by them, and died under them. The hierarchy was presented not as a bias to be corrected but as a natural order to be acknowledged — a factual statement about the way the world operates, offered by a man whose position within the hierarchy gave him the authority to define its terms.
Borg also called a Black female colleague a “Black shit” — a characterisation he denied when the Journal sought comment. After the incident was reported to NEOM’s human resources department, Borg was prescribed six months of personal coaching. He reportedly continued the offensive behaviour privately afterward, referring to the episode as “that f—ing episode I had with that Black bitch.” The coaching addressed the complaint. It did not address the man.
He referred to Gulf women as “transvestites” and made lewd jokes about Islam in connection to sexual positions. He sent an inappropriate message to an employee that read “I miss you,” accompanied by comments about the employee’s appearance. The range of targets — South Asian workers, Black colleagues, Arab women, Islam itself, individual employees — indicates not a specific prejudice but a comprehensive one. Borg’s contempt was not directed at one group. It was directed at everyone who was not him.
The CEO
Nadhmi al-Nasr served as NEOM’s chief executive from August 2018 until his departure in November 2024. His management style, as documented by the Wall Street Journal and subsequent reporting, was characterised by statements and behaviours that would constitute grounds for dismissal in any publicly listed corporation operating under Western governance standards.
Al-Nasr was recorded telling staff: “I drive everybody like a slave. When they drop down dead, I celebrate. That’s how I do my projects.” The statement was made in a meeting, recorded, and reported by the Journal. Its significance lies not only in its content but in its setting: this was not a private conversation but a declaration of management philosophy, delivered to subordinates as an explanation of how the organisation functions. The metaphor of slavery — deployed by the CEO of a project built by migrant workers bound to their employers under the kafala system, unable to leave without permission, unable to change jobs without payment, unable to exit the country without consent — was either unconscious irony or deliberate cruelty. Neither interpretation is exculpatory.
Former employees alleged that al-Nasr had threatened to “take a gun from under my desk and shoot you” during interactions with his communications team. The statement, if accurately reported, describes a chief executive who communicated with his public relations staff through death threats. The employees who reported the threat did so after leaving the organisation.
Al-Nasr’s management culture was described by former staff as one that “belittled expatriates, made unrealistic demands, and neglected discrimination in the workplace.” The description is notable for its mildness — the language of an HR exit interview rather than a criminal complaint. The behaviours it describes — belittling, unrealistic demands, neglected discrimination — are the conditions that enable the more extreme behaviours documented in the recordings. A culture that belittles is a culture in which slurs are tolerated. A culture that neglects discrimination is a culture in which racial hierarchy becomes organisational structure.
Al-Nasr’s departure was announced on 12 November 2024. NEOM provided no official reason. Reporting attributed the departure to his failure to deliver on key performance indicators — a framing that assigned his removal to missed construction targets rather than to the documented pattern of abusive leadership. His replacement, Aiman al-Mudaifer, came from PIF’s Saudi real estate division. The change in leadership was presented as operational, not corrective.
Antoni Vives
Antoni Vives, a senior executive who managed The Line project, departed alongside al-Nasr in late 2024. His background adds a dimension that the other departures do not.
Vives had a 2021 Spanish court conviction for corruption during a previous job at Barcelona’s city hall. He pleaded guilty to giving a friend a “no-show job” — a fraudulent employment contract worth approximately $165,000 over four years. He received a two-year suspended prison sentence. Spanish prosecutors are currently seeking a separate six-year sentence against him for criminal conspiracy, fraud, and perversion of justice in a related case. Both matters were matters of public record in Spain. NEOM hired him to manage its flagship project.
At NEOM, Vives reportedly developed a protective bond with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman that allowed continued misconduct. He was said to have resigned from NEOM at one point but returned after bonding with MBS. He physically wrestled with a construction manager — a physical confrontation between a senior executive and a subordinate in the workplace. The incident occurred in the context of a management culture that the Journal described as featuring violence, intimidation, and dysfunction at the executive level.
The combination — a man facing six years for criminal conspiracy hired to manage a project that an internal audit would subsequently find contained “evidence of deliberate manipulation” by management — presents a question about NEOM’s executive vetting that the organisation has not addressed. Whether Vives’s prior conviction was known to NEOM at the time of hiring, and if so, what risk assessment was conducted, has not been disclosed.
The Medical Reports
The Wall Street Journal’s investigation uncovered internal medical reports from NEOM that documented incidents beyond the routine construction injuries that any large project generates. The reports included documented instances of gang rape among workers, attempted murder, and suicide. Children as young as 8 were found driving trucks on construction sites.
These findings were not published by human rights organisations working from the outside. They were contained in NEOM’s own internal medical documentation — records produced by the project’s own healthcare system. The organisation was aware of the conditions because its own doctors were treating the consequences.
The children found driving trucks — eight years old, operating heavy vehicles on an active construction site — represent a finding so extreme that it defies the categories of labour abuse that human rights organisations typically document. Child labour is a spectrum. An eight-year-old driving a truck on a construction site is not on the spectrum. It is an operational failure so complete that the systems designed to prevent it — age verification, site access controls, vehicle operation protocols — must not have existed or must have been entirely unenforced.
The gang rape documentation is particularly significant because it describes violence committed within the worker camps — the isolated settlements in the Tabuk desert where NEOM’s 140,000-strong workforce was housed. The camps are fenced, guarded, and remote — hundreds of miles from the nearest town. Workers who are victims of violence within the camps cannot leave the camps without authorisation, cannot access law enforcement without employer cooperation, and cannot contact external support services from a location that is, by design, disconnected from the civilian infrastructure of the Kingdom.
The suicides documented in the medical reports are the terminal expression of the isolation, exploitation, and hopelessness that the HRW report, the ITV documentary, and the BWI complaint have documented from the outside. Workers described themselves as “trapped slaves.” The medical records confirm that some reached the point at which being trapped was no longer endurable.
A McKinsey consultant died in a head-on nighttime crash — an incident that the Journal included in its broader documentation of NEOM’s safety environment. The death of a consultant, as opposed to a construction worker, entered the record because McKinsey employees operate within corporate structures that track fatalities. The construction workers who die on the same roads, at the same hours, in the same conditions, are tracked by a system designed to produce the opposite outcome: the absence of a record.
The Response
NEOM’s institutional response to the Wall Street Journal investigation was a statement: “Protecting welfare is a top priority.” The statement was not accompanied by an acknowledgement of any specific allegation, a commitment to investigate any specific incident, or the identification of any specific corrective action.
Wayne Borg was replaced. Michael Lynch was named acting sector head for NEOM’s media division. Lynch’s career — former CEO of the Sydney Opera House from 1998 to 2002, CEO of London’s Southbank Centre from 2002 to 2009, CEO of Hong Kong’s West Kowloon Cultural District Authority from 2011 to 2015, and general manager of the Australia Council — represents the institutional arts establishment at its most credentialled. He joined NEOM in late 2023 as sector head of entertainment and culture. His appointment as Borg’s acting replacement was not described as a consequence of the Journal’s reporting. It was presented as a personnel change — one of many in an organisation that has experienced comprehensive executive turnover since 2024.
Borg denied calling his Black female colleague a “Black shit.” He did not deny the other documented statements. His denial of the specific racial slur, set against the absence of denial of the broader pattern of racist commentary, suggests a calculation about which statements were defensible rather than a comprehensive refutation of the Journal’s findings.
No criminal investigation was initiated in Saudi Arabia in response to the documented allegations of gang rape, attempted murder, or child labour. No regulatory action was taken against NEOM or its contractors for the workplace fatalities that Borg described as evidence of worker stupidity. No professional sanctions were imposed on any executive named in the investigation. The institutional consequences of the Journal’s reporting were limited to personnel changes that were presented as unrelated to the reporting itself.
The Culture as Structure
The temptation is to treat the Borg recordings and the al-Nasr statements as individual failures — bad actors in an otherwise functional organisation, whose removal solves the problem. This interpretation is convenient. It is also wrong.
The culture that Borg and al-Nasr expressed was not incidental to NEOM’s operations. It was structural. It was the culture required by a project that planned to build a 170-kilometre city in the desert using 140,000 migrant workers bound to their employers under a sponsorship system, managed from remote camps with no access to legal assistance, paying off debts they incurred to reach jobs they could not leave, in temperatures that caused daily fainting episodes, under executives who described them as f—ing morons whose deaths were evidence of their own stupidity.
The racial hierarchy that Borg articulated — white executives at the top, South Asian workers at the bottom — was not his invention. It was the operational reality of NEOM’s workforce structure. The executive floors were populated by Western professionals recruited from global firms with salaries, benefits, housing, and exit options. The construction sites were populated by South Asian workers recruited through debt-funded agencies with wages that were routinely underpaid, documentation that was routinely confiscated, and exit options that were routinely denied.
Borg did not create this hierarchy. He described it. The description was offensive because it was accurate — because the truth about NEOM’s labour model is that it operates on a racial stratification so complete that a white Australian executive could state it openly, in a meeting, and the recording would circulate as news not because the hierarchy was surprising but because someone had been indiscreet enough to articulate what everyone in the organisation understood.
Al-Nasr’s slave metaphor operated in the same register. He did not create the kafala system. He did not design the recruitment fee pipeline. He did not establish the legal framework that prevents workers from leaving their employers. He managed a workforce that was already, by every structural indicator, unfree — and he described his management of that workforce in the language of slave driving. The metaphor was not a figure of speech. It was a job description.
The Accountability Gap
No executive named in the Wall Street Journal investigation has faced legal consequences in any jurisdiction. Borg’s racist statements would violate workplace discrimination law in the United Kingdom, the United States, Australia, and every EU member state. They did not violate Saudi law, which does not prohibit racial discrimination in private sector employment with the enforcement mechanisms common in Western jurisdictions.
Al-Nasr’s departure was framed as operational, not punitive. Vives’s prior corruption conviction in Spain had no bearing on his employment at NEOM. The medical reports documenting gang rape, attempted murder, suicide, and child labour produced no known criminal referrals.
The accountability gap is not an oversight. It is a feature of NEOM’s jurisdictional positioning. The project operates in Saudi Arabia, where labour law enforcement against mega-project employers is minimal, where press freedom does not exist, where judicial independence in cases involving royal projects is not a reasonable expectation, and where the entity that owns the project — PIF — is chaired by the Crown Prince. The executives who made the statements, managed the workforce, and presided over the conditions documented in the medical reports operated in a jurisdiction where the consequences of their conduct were limited to career risk — the possibility that their behaviour, if published by a foreign newspaper, might result in their replacement by someone who would say the same things more quietly.
Wayne Borg called South Asian workers f—ing morons. His replacement will, presumably, not call them that. Whether his replacement will manage them differently — pay them on time, investigate their deaths, give them access to legal assistance, and allow them to leave — is a question that the personnel change does not address, because the personnel change addresses the language, not the structure.
The workers are still in the camps. The kafala system still operates. The death classification system still converts workplace fatalities into natural causes. The recruitment fee pipeline still delivers indebted workers to employers who hold their passports. None of these systems changed when Wayne Borg was replaced. None of them changed when Nadhmi al-Nasr departed. The culture that the Journal documented was not the culture of two men. It was the culture of a project that requires 140,000 trapped workers to function and that treats them, structurally and operationally, exactly as its executives described them: as a disposable workforce whose deaths are evidence of their own inadequacy and whose value is determined by their race.
The tapes are the evidence. The structure is the crime. The personnel changes are the response. And the workers — the men who Borg called morons and al-Nasr managed like slaves — are still there, in the camps, in the desert, building a city that their executives could not build without them and could not discuss without dehumanising them.
This investigation draws on the Wall Street Journal investigation into NEOM executive culture (September 2024); reporting by Deadline, Variety, Fortune, and NBC News on Wayne Borg and Nadhmi al-Nasr; NEOM’s corporate statements; documentation of Antoni Vives’s Spanish court conviction; Bloomberg’s reporting on al-Nasr’s departure (November 2024); and internal medical reports as documented by the Wall Street Journal. Vision2030.AI is editorially independent and is not affiliated with NEOM, PIF, or any official Vision 2030 entity.