“The first capitalist city in the world. NEOM will be floated in the markets. It’s as if you float the city of New York.”

This is how Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman described NEOM, a new $500 billion megacity that will straddle ten thousand square miles of the desert landscape between Egypt and Jordan. Covering an area the size of Massachusetts in one of the most beautiful but sparsely populated corners of the world, the solar-powered megacity aims to rely on self-driving cars and talking robots for much of its workings.

The announcement was made during the Future Investment Initiative,” a meeting in the Kingdom’s capital Riyadh that’s been dubbed “Davos In the Desert.” It brought together a “Who’s Who” of capital, with over 3,000 leaders of the business world that between them control more than $20 trillion. US Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and his predecessor Larry Summers, BlackRock’s founder Larry Fink, Blackstone’s cofounder Stephen Schwarzman, and IMF president Christine Lagarde were but a few of the attendees.