Continuing a string of big investments in the company

Dec 19, 2011 12:21 GMT  ·  By

Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal has announced a $300 million, €230 million investment in Twitter, partially through his Kingdom Holding fund. The investment comes after several months of negotiations, the investors revealed, but few other details were revealed.

Twitter has confirmed the investment but hasn't commented on it. Twitter's valuation was not revealed, but assuming it was at $8 billion, €6.13 billion this would give the prince a 3.75 percent stake in the company.

Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Bin Abdulaziz Alsaud is the founder and CEO of Kingdom Holding Company, in which he holds a 94 percent stake.

"Our investment in Twitter reaffirms our ability in identifying suitable opportunities to invest in promising, high-growth businesses with a global impact," prince Alwaleed said.

The prince is well known for his investments and holds stakes in several big companies, GM, Citigroup, as well as several large technology companies, including Apple, Amazon, AOL and so on. He also holds a 7 percent stake in News Corp.

He bought about 5 percent of Apple shares in 1997, for about $115 million, €88.2 million. Given the huge spike in value Apple shares have seen since, the stake would now be worth about $9 billion, €6.9 billion.

He is listed as the 26th most richest person on Earth in 2011 with an estimated worth of $19.6 billion, €15 billion.

Twitter is certainly not lacking in eager investors wanting to pour money in it. In fact, venture capital represents the vast majority of Twitter's funding so far, revenue is estimated at about $140 million, €107 million for 2011, three times bigger than in 2010, but still very small.

Twitter is working on expanding its ad program. It has started to open up its self-serve ad program to some advertisers, but it won't be available to everyone for a while to come. Still, even if progress is slow, Twitter is on its way to starting to generate significant ad revenue.