From "Edward Gibbon at America’s Grave"
"One World Trade Center, in the original design, was also meant to restore vertical architectural supremacy to Manhattan and to be the tallest building in the world. This global phallic rivalry was won instead by Dubai’s Burj Khalifa super-tower, completed last year and twice as high as the Empire State Building.
In a few years Dubai, however, will have to surrender the gold cup to Saudi Arabia and the bin Laden family.
Financed by Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal, who revels in being known as the “Arabian Warren Buffet,” the planned Kingdom Tower in Jeddah — the ultimate hyperbole for Saudi despotism — will pierce the clouds along the Red Sea coastline at an incredible altitude of one full kilometer (3,281 feet).
One World Trade Center, on the other hand, will max out at 1,776 feet above the Hudson. (Conspiracy theorists can obsess over this coincidence: the number of feet higher the Saudi Arabian tower will be than the American one almost exactly equals the number of people who died in the North Tower of the WTC in 2001.)
With little publicity, the initial billion-dollar contract for the Jeddah spire was awarded by Prince Al-Waleed to the Arab world’s mega-builders and skyscraper experts — the Binladen Group. It may keep their family name alive for centuries to come."