[liberationtech] Saudi Prince invests $300mn in Twitter

Mon Dec 19 11:30:08 PST 2011

I agree with Jillian. Slow news day on the markets?

On Mon, Dec 19, 2011 at 11:21 AM, Jillian C. York <jilliancyork at gmail.com>wrote:

> Honestly?  I trust that this will have less than zero effect on Twitter's
> policy.  Twitter has stood up to a whole lot of other powerful players,
> including the US and UK governments.  Saudi's powerful, but we're talking
> about a share of under 5%. Try as they might, Kingdom Holding will likely
> have minimal effect.
>
> Is it icky?  For sure, but so are a lot of deals.
>
>
>
> On Mon, Dec 19, 2011 at 3:26 AM, Daniel Isaiah Ong <
> danielo at cs.stanford.edu> wrote:
>
>> Thoughts?
>>
>>
>> http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2011/12/19/saudi-prince-invests-300-million-in-twitter/?hp
>>
>> Saudi Prince Invests $300 Million in TwitterBY MARK SCOTT<http://dealbook.nytimes.com/author/mark-scott/>
>>
>> LONDON — The Saudi Prince Walid bin Talal and his investment company,
>> Kingdom Holding, said Monday they had bought a “strategic stake” in the
>> social media site Twitter for $300 million.
>>
>> The investment represents roughly 3 percent stake of the company, based
>> in San Francisco, which was valued at $8 billion in August.
>>
>> In a statement, Prince Walid, who owns 95 percent of Kingdom Holding,
>> said the purchase was part of a strategy “to invest in promising,
>> high-growth businesses with a global impact.”
>>   Article Tools
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>>    - Twitter
>>
>> Despite ongoing volatility in the financial markets, investors have shown
>> continued interest in Internet companies. Last week, the social network
>> gaming company Zynga raised $1 billion in an initial public offering, while
>> Groupon, the daily deals site, raised $700 million from the markets in
>> early November.
>>
>> Kingdom Holding stock was up about 6 percent in midday trading in Riyadh.
>>
>> Prince Walid, who also own stakes in U.S. blue chip companies such as
>> Citigroup, General Motors and Apple, is the nephew of Saudi Arabia’s King
>> Abdullah. He also is one the of the Arab world’s richest men, with assets
>> worth an estimated $21 billion, according to Arabian Business magazine.
>>
>> The investment in Twitter comes after the company’s co-founder Biz Stone
>> announced in June that he would be stepping back from the fast-growing
>> social media. Twitter’s other co-founder, Evan Williams, was replaced by
>> the current chief executive Dick Costolo last year.
>>
>> Despite the management shake-up, Twitter has continued to gain traction,
>> particularly in the Arab world, where it was credited with playing a role
>> in the recent popular uprisings across North Africa and the Gulf.
>>
>> Arabic is now the fastest growing language used on Twitter, according to
>> the data intelligence company Semiocast.
>>
>> The volume of Arabic messages, for example, has multiplied by 2,146
>> percent in the 12 months ending in October, according to figures from
>> Semiocast. That makes Arabic the eighth most used language on the site.
>>
>> “We believe that social media will fundamentally change the media
>> industry landscape in the coming years. Twitter will capture and monetize
>> this positive trend,” Ahmed Reda Halawani, Kingdom Holding’s executive
>> director of private equity and international investments, said in a
>> statement.
>>
>> The website currently has over 100 million active users, and raised
>> approximately $400 million of new capital last summer. That investment was
>> led by DST Global, the investment firm headed by the Russian billionaire
>> Yuri Milner.
>>
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>
>
>
> --
> jilliancyork.com | @jilliancyork | tel: +1-857-891-4244 | google voice:
> +1-415-562-JILL
>
>
>
>
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