Mckinsey on SAUDI VISION 2030 Intelligence Platform

MBS and the Consultants: How McKinsey, BCG, and the Advisory Industry Sold Saudi Arabia an Impossible Future

Sun, 05 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

McKinsey, BCG and Saudi Arabia

McKinsey and BCG sit at the centre of Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030 consulting machine: NEOM strategy, megaproject scope, large fee exposure, and public accountability questions. 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 Complicity Index: Every Corporation Profiting from NEOM's Human Cost

Sun, 05 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

NEOM corporate complicity means the international firms named in the project’s strategy, design, construction, logistics, and technology stack: McKinsey, BIG, Bechtel, DSV, and dozens more. This index tracks what each company did for NEOM, what payment or exposure is public, and what human-rights due diligence has or has not been disclosed.

NEOM is not built by Saudi Arabia. It is built by a global supply chain of corporations — strategy consultants who designed the plans, architecture firms who drew the renderings, construction companies who poured the concrete, logistics firms who moved the materials, and technology partners who provided the systems. Each of these corporations operates under the legal frameworks of its home jurisdiction. Each has human rights obligations under the OECD Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises, the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, and — for European firms — the emerging requirements of the EU Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive. Each has a communications department that issues statements about corporate responsibility, sustainability, and ethical business practices.

The Graveyard of Giga-Projects: A Forensic Audit of Every Vision 2030 Project That Failed, Flopped, or Quietly Died

Sun, 05 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Vision 2030 Failed Projects: The Line, Mukaab, Trojena

This audit tracks the Vision 2030 projects that were cancelled, suspended, scaled back, or quietly stripped of their original thesis, from The Line and the Mukaab to Trojena, Oxagon, and Jeddah Tower. The pattern is visible only when the entire giga-project portfolio is examined at once: projects with standalone economics survived, while projects dependent on the integrated megacity thesis broke first.

What follows is the forensic record of what the Kingdom built, what it abandoned, what it spent, and what it has left to show for the most expensive construction programme in modern history.

The McKinsey Bill: $1 Billion in Fees for Unbuildable Plans

Sun, 05 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The McKinsey NEOM relationship is, at its simplest, a consulting-fee story. 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.