The richest city in the world

Ninety miles from Dubai, another Xanadu has been decreed. Its name is Abu Dhabi, and that $3 billion hotel is just the beginning of the story.

…Welcome to Abu Dhabi, the capital of the United Arab Emirates and the richest city in the world. The emirate’s 420,000 citizens, who sit on one-tenth of the planet’s oil and have almost $1 trillion invested abroad, are worth about $17 million apiece. (A million foreign workers don’t share in the wealth.) Yet most people couldn’t find Abu Dhabi on a map. Khaldoon’s job is to change that. Tall, handsome, and politically savvy, he wants to make his hometown mentioned in the same breath as Singapore, Tokyo – and yes, Dubai.

But does the UAE, a federation of seven emirates strung out along the Persian Gulf, need another Dubai just a two-hour drive away? Does it need another long-haul airline, another financial center, another tourism destination, another billion-dollar hotel? “The short answer,” says Khaldoon, “is yes. But I don’t like to use comparisons with Dubai. We’re not trying to be Dubai. What they’ve done is phenomenal, and we’re very proud of it. But here we have a unique opportunity to get it right.”


That’s a subtle dig at Abu Dhabi’s brash neighbor to the north. On the surface, what’s happening in Abu Dhabi mirrors Dubai. But what’s driving growth here is different. Dubai is a story of survival – how one small city running out of oil saved itself with a mixture of tourism, commercialism, and pizzazz. Abu Dhabi doesn’t need to do anything. It has the oil reserves and the financial cushion to sit back and watch the Dubai experiment. But the leaders of a new generation want more. And they want it on their terms, with all the splendor and none of the crassness that has afflicted Dubai.

“They know they also have to diversify their economy away from just oil,” says Christopher Davidson, a political science professor at Durham University in Britain, who has written a book on the UAE. “But there’s also a bit of rivalry. Abu Dhabi is peeved that Dubai is internationally recognized and it isn’t.”

Fortune