Saudi's Prince Alwaleed invests $300m in Twitter

Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, the chairman of Saudi Arabia’s Kingdom Holding Company (KHC) has invested $300m to buy a ‘strategic stake’ in popular social networking site Twitter.

In an emailed statement on Monday KHC said that the Twitter deal had been the result of “several months of negotiations and comprehensive due diligence.

“Our investment in Twitter reaffirms our ability in identifying suitable opportunities to invest in promising, high-growth businesses with a global impact,” the statement said.  

Prince Alwaleed, whose investments include stakes in General Motors Co, News Corp and Apple Inc, was named the world’s richest Arab by Arabian Business on Sunday with a confirmed personal fortune of $21.3bn. The prince, who signed a deal with Bloomberg in September to launch his own news channel, saw his wealth rise by 4.4 percent over the course of 2011.

Kingdom Holding, which is 95 percent owned by the prince, is building the tallest tower in the world in Jeddah at a cost of SR4.6bn ($1.23bn). Work on the 1,000m superscraper is set to begin in January, the architects behind the project said in November.

The number of Twitter users in Saudi Arabia rose by 240 percent in 2010, significantly above the global average, the microblogging site said earlier this year.

In September, CEO Dick Costolo said that Twitter had 100m active users logging in at least once a month, and 50m active users every day. The site hosts around 230m 'tweets' every day.