Interestingly Emaar's early projects were not successful by any measure. It was only when Nakheel launched the Palm that the property market took off. My unsubstantiated understanding of the island's launch are informative: Apparently the Palm launched at one of the property shows – Cityscape most likely – and sales were slow on the first day. On hearing this HH ordered priced to be reduced substantially (I have heard figures up to 50%). Sales then took off but from the onset it was speculators looking to take advantage of this artificially low prices and that set the tone for much of the Dubai real estate story that followed (everything sold out but buildings and homes were never actually full apart from perhaps the Greens). My understanding is that Nakheel was losing money on each sale and so took measures such as increasing villa density of the fronds to make up for it.

Alabbar saw the bubble earlier than most. That was one of the main reasons he took to geographic diversification.

An icon such as the Burj Khalifa was necessary for him to negotiate the land concessions from the Dubai government at that stage as his personal relationships with HH and other political leaders was a shadow of what it once was. Emaar's status as a public co and a profitable one also made it difficult for land concessions or handouts – why share the profits with shareholders when Dubai could reap them all solely?

Emaar also looked to diversify into other productive investments – education (schools), healthcare and even industry.

But I would be interested to know how responsible Alabbar is for Dubai's rush toward insanely large megadevelopments. I often see him described as extremely charismatic, and projects like Dubai Marina certainly seem like big influencers on the craziness that followed. Were others trying to act and think like him to attract the attention / approval of their leaders?

This leads me to suspect that if Alabbar led by example on a few more grounded / sensible ideas – building a great research university, for example – then the rush to imitate by his lesser rivals might have produced some slightly more long-term useful white elephants as legacies of the boom.