Prince Alwaleed bin Talal announced today that he’s purchased an approximately 3-percent stake in social media site Twitterfor $300 million. Alwaleed is one of the wealthiest men in the world and his interest in Twitter could mean even bigger things for the site in the future. In August, Twitter raised $800 million from private investors and was valued at $8.4 billion. Alwaleed’s stake could value the company at more than $10 billion now.
The Twitter stake, bought jointly by Alwaleed and his Kingdom Holding Co investment firm, resulted from “months of negotiations”, Kingdom said in a statement.
Applying an $8 billion valuation figure for Twitter used by some analysts, the investment by Alwaleed and Kingdom amounts to a 3.75-percent stake.
Twitter, which allows people to send 140-character text messages, or Tweets, to groups of so-called followers, is one of the Web’s most popular social networking services, along with Facebook and Zynga.
The company said in September that was in no hurry to undertake a hotly anticipated initial public offering. It raised $400 million in venture capital financing this summer.
It now counts more than 100 million active users who log onto the service at least once a month.
