Saudi Prince Invests $300m in Twitter- Investment, or Cause for Apprehension?

By siliconindia   |   Wednesday, 21 December 2011, 01:17 IST
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Bangalore: Al-Waleel Bin Talal Saudi prince by day, and richest businessman in Saudi Arabia by night, is ranked by Forbes as the 26th wealthiest man in the world. Knowing this, it really is no surprise that Talal invested $300 million in Twitter. The investor prince also holds some of the largest stakes of major conglomerates such as the Fox News group, and Citibank. The $300 million (that Talal now owns) makes up for three quarters of the secondary shares; which belonged to direct employees and other existing investors of the micro-blogging site, and were open to purchase. Now although this is something that would interest the economy-watchers in us, one can't help but wonder what a member of the ruling family (of one of the most conservative countries in the world) would want to do with shares in a social media website. November 2010 saw Facebook blocked and unblocked all on the same day, oddly, for censorship issues by the Saudi Government. Whether this move is just that of mammon, or a key decision to let Big Brother watch you, is yet to bother Twitter though. In Twitter's shoes, Jeff Mann, an analyst from Gartner Inc. the economy-analyst-giant observed that this would be an opportunity to give Twitter some more running space, before going public, a move that it knows its competitor, Facebook is eyeing. If in case Twitter does go public, it will join Zynga (and other such public going shockers), which became famous through its casual social games such as Farmville on Facebook.