Liz Gannes

Recent Posts by Liz Gannes

Saudi Prince Invests $300M in Twitter

Prince Alwaleed bin Talal — the nephew of the Saudi Arabian King Abdullah — has invested $300 million in Twitter. Alwaleed is one of the richest people in the world, currently ranked No. 26 on Forbes’ billionaire list, with a net worth of $19.6 billion.

The Twitter investment, through his Kingdom Holding Co., was just announced via press release and confirmed by Twitter.

A spokesman for Twitter said he had no additional details to share beyond the release.

Twitter’s last round of funding, which closed this summer, valued the company at $8.4 billion and was led by Digital Sky Technologies (DST) of Russia.

Of late, the most well-known international Web investor has been DST founder Yuri Milner, who has stakes in Twitter, Facebook and Zynga. Prince Alwaleed has been more active as a media investor, with a large stake in News Corp. (which owns AllThingsD), for instance.

In a statement, a Kingdom Holding Co. executive noted the coming impact of social media on the media industry, and Twitter’s potential to monetize it.

If you’re looking to get a better sense of Prince Alwaleed, here’s a Charlie Rose interview from last year.

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Nobody was excited about paying top dollar for a movie about WikiLeaks. A film about the origins of Pets.com would have done better.

— Gitesh Pandya of BoxOfficeGuru.com comments on the dreadful opening weekend box office numbers for “The Fifth Estate.”