Riyadh: Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal have agreed to buy a $300 million stake in Twitter Inc., the microblogging service with about 100 million users.
Prince Alwaleed, who owns 95% of Kingdom Holding, has focused his investments on banks, hotels and media companies, building sizable stakes in companies such as Citigroup Inc., News Corp., Apple Inc. and Time Warner Inc. News Corp. owns The Wall Street Journal.
The joint investment with Alwaleed’s Kingdom Holding Co. follows months of negotiations and represents a strategic stake in Twitter, according to the Riyadh, Saudi Arabia-based investment firm.
Prince Alwaleed, rated by Arabian Business magazine as the Arab world’s richest man, with more than $21 billion in wealth in 2011, had been cited in news reports since October as pursuing a purchase of Twitter shares from one of the co-founders of the social media company.
The $300 million investment represents a more than 3% stake in the microblogging website, which was at late summer valued at $8 billion.
“Social media will fundamentally change the media industry landscape in the coming years. Twitter will capture and monetize this positive trend,” Ahmed Halawani, executive director of private equity and international investments at Kingdom Holding, said in the statement.
Twitter spokesman Matt Graves confirmed the investment, but declined to comment further.
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