Saudi Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Becomes Twitter’s Second Largest Shareholder

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Islamist media is reporting that Saudi Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal has doubled his Twitter holdings to become the site’s second largest shareholder. According to the Middle East Monitor report:

October 8,  2015 Saudi billionaire Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal and his investment company have doubled their shares in Twitter, to become the microblogging site’s second largest shareholder.

A joint statement released yesterday by the prince and his Kingdom Holding Company revealed that their combined shares represent more than five per cent of Twitter’s common stock, with a market value of $1 billion.

The prince and Kingdom Holding originally invested $300 million in Twitter in 2011 before the site went public two years later.”

Alwaleed Bin Talal is a Saudi Arabian businessman, investor, and a member of the Saudi royal family. He is the founder, CEO, and 95% owner of the Kingdom Holding Company which describes itself as a diversified investment company, whose main interests are banking / financial services, real estate, hotels, media, entertainment, and internet / technology. In March 2013, Forbes listed Al Waleed as the 26th-richest man in the world, with an estimated net worth of US $20 Billion. In 2011, Prince Talal bought a $300 million dollar stake in Twitter, the social-media giant and he has partnered with the Bloomberg news service to establish a new Arabic language news channel expected to launch in 2014. Prince Talal is known to have made donations to both the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) and to the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR), both part of the US Muslim Brotherhood. He is also a known to have been a major supporter of the Georgetown University Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding (CCMU), run by long-time apologist for the Muslim Brotherhood Dr. John Esposito and the Center is actually known as the Alwaleed Bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding.

In 2008 we reported that Prince Talal had made numerous financial contributions to a pan-Islamic interfaith dialog organization that is closely tied to the global Muslim Brotherhood and which has an antisemitic statement posted on its website. Our predecessor publication also reported in 2008 that Prince Talal was one of the sponsors of a conference held by the World Congress of Muslim Philanthropists (WCMP), a new international Islamic philanthropic organization with strong Muslim Brotherhood representation. The GMBDW reported in July 2013 that Prince Talal had met with the Secretary-General of the Muslim World League at the Prince’s offices in Riyadh in order to discuss philanthropic activity. In August 2013, we reported that Kuwaiti Muslim Brotherhood leader Tariq Al-Suwaidan was removed as head of the Al-Resalah TV channel by Prince Talal who said Al-Suwaidan had admitted being a leader in the Kuwaiti Muslim Brotherhood. (For the contradictions in Saudi policy toward the Global Muslim Brotherhood, see today’s post here.)

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