Many of the world's most iconic structures come with unusual stories.

French intellectuals and artists at first hated the "monstrous" Eiffel Tower; the British hid the Taj Mahal under bamboo scaffolding to stop it being bombed by the Luftwaffe during World War II; and it took a big leap of faith for the Golden Gate Bridge to be painted its now iconic, but then unorthodox, burnt orange.

If Saudi Arabia's proposed one-kilometre-high Jeddah Tower ever gets finished, architectural historians will also have a rich storybook to dig into.

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But, right now, that seems a big if.

Announced in 2008 by Saudi billionaire Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, construction of the building has been plagued by delays and may not ever recover from an apparent power play involving two of the world's wealthiest men.

Over the past five years, the tower has not grown an inch taller than the 63 storeys it reached in 2017, when construction ground to a mysterious and sudden halt.

Planned to stand an imperious 252 storeys, Jeddah Tower was primed to dwarf regional rival Dubai's 828m Burj Khalifa, currently the world's tallest building.

Topped out, Jeddah Tower would be at least the equivalent of three stacked Eiffel Towers.

That now looks a long way off.

Current photographs of the tower show a deserted site and a lonely skeleton of empty concrete floors, standing around 250m tall, about one-quarter of its proposed final height.

When Prince Alwaleed announced the project it was estimated to cost around $US1.3 billion to build, marginally less than the $1.5b Burj Khalifa.

The tower was to be the crown jewel in a totally new waterfront development called Jeddah Economic City, 80 kilometres to the north-west of Mecca.

It would also be a prestige project – both for Saudi, to softly assert its regional dominance over the United Arab Emirates, and Alwaleed, personally.

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At the time, Alwaleed was one of Saudi's highest-flying entrepreneurs, and the ambitious Jeddah Tower project seemed a natural fit.

Around the turn of the millennium, Alwaleed was making serious big money moves which had projected him as the face of Saudi business abroad.

Enriched with unimaginable oil wealth, the grandson of the first king of Saudi Arabia was snapping up sizable stakes in companies like Apple, News Corp, Netscape and Motorola, and investing heavily in Coca-Cola, Ford and other global powerhouses.

His property portfolio was headlined with glamour investments in some of the world's most prestigious properties, including the Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts, New York's Plaza Hotel, London's Savoy Hotel and Monaco's Monte Carlo Grand Hotel.

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