Skip to main content

Saudi Prince Alwaleed invests $300 million in Twitter

Prince-Alwaleed-Bin-Talal
Image used with permission by copyright holder

Saudi Arabian billionaire Prince Alwaleed bin Talal and his investment firm, Kingdom Holding Company, have made a $300 million joint-investment in Twitter, the Kingdom Holding’s company announced early today. The jackpot investment comes just after Twitter rolled out a new advertiser-friendly redesign across all its platforms.

Kingdom Holding Company, of which Prince Alwaleed is the Chairman, currently has major stakes in a number of other American companies, including Apple, General Motors, and Citigroup, reports Bloomberg. Its investment in Twitter is seen Kingdom Holding as securing a “strategic stake” in the popular microblogging platform.

“We believe that social media will fundamentally change the media industry landscape in the coming years,” said Eng. Ahmed Halawani, Kingdom Holding Executive Director of Private Equity and International Investments. “Twitter will capture and monetize this positive trend.”

Prince Alwaleed reiterated the company’s bravado in the deal, saying in a statement: “Our investment in Twitter reaffirms our ability in identifying suitable opportunities to invest in promising, high-growth businesses with a global impact.”

The investment is, of course, great news for Twitter from a business standpoint. Some analysts predict that the Alwaleed-Kingdom Holding money injection gives Twitter a total value of around $10 billion. This is helped by the estimate by EMarketer Inc, which foresees Twitter boosting revenue by 86 percent in 2012, thanks to additional advertising.

[Image via]

Editors' Recommendations

Topics
Andrew Couts
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Features Editor for Digital Trends, Andrew Couts covers a wide swath of consumer technology topics, with particular focus on…
WhatsApp now lets you send self-destructing voice messages
WhatsApp logo on a phone.

If you’re on WhatsApp and regularly make use of the view once feature for photo and video messages, then you might be interested to learn that the feature has now been expanded to voice messages.

WhatsApp’s view once feature does what it says, deleting a message after it’s been viewed a single time. It’s been available for photos and videos since 2021, but now you can also send voice messages that can only be played once before they, too, disappear from the app.

Read more
X rival Threads could be about to get millions of more users
Instagram Threads app.

Threads -- Meta’s rival to X, formerly Twitter -- has just launched in the European Union (EU), a market with nearly half a billion people.

The app launched in the U.S. to much fanfare in July, with Meta hoping to attract X users disillusioned with the turbulence on the platform since Elon Musk acquired it for $44 billion 14 months ago.

Read more
X (formerly Twitter) returns after global outage
A white X on a black background, which could be Twitter's new logo.

X, formerly known as Twitter, went down for about 90 minutes for users worldwide early on Thursday ET.

Anyone opening the social media app across all platforms was met with a blank timeline. On desktop, users saw a message that simply read, "Welcome to X," while on mobile the app showed suggestions for accounts to follow.

Read more