In the summer of 2020, two videogame companies canceled sponsorship deals with Saudi Arabia’s planned city-state Neom following complaints from fans about the country’s human rights record. Neom’s chief executive, Nadmi al-Nasr, called an emergency meeting over the weekend and asked his communications team why it had not warned him that this could happen.
“If you don’t tell me who’s responsible,” Nasr said, according to people with direct knowledge of the meeting, “I’m going to take a gun out of my desk and shoot you.”