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Twitter lands $300M investment from Saudi prince

December 19, 2011 — 9:26am ET | By Jason Ankeny

Saudi billionaire Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Bin Abdulaziz Alsaud and his Kingdom Holding Company have made a combined $300 million strategic investment in microblogging platform Twitter. In a statement, KHC said the investment followed several months of negotiations. It is unclear how much of Twitter Alwaleed will control.

Forbes estimates Alwaleed's net worth at $19.6 billion, making him the 26^th richest person in the world as well as the richest individual in Saudi Arabia. Alwaleed is founder and CEO of Kingdom Holding Company, owning 94 percent of the firm--previous KHC investments include Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL), Amazon.com, eBay and Priceline.com.

Earlier this year, Twitter completed a two-stage investment round totaling $800 million including a reported $400 million from DST Global, the investment fund led by Russian billionaire Yuri Milner. That round valued Twitter at $8 billion--the startup was valued at $3.7 billion in December 2010, when it received $200 million in funding from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.

Twitter now boasts more than 100 million active users, 55 percent of whom are active on mobile devices. According to the Pew Internet Center, 13 percent of adult Americans who go online are on Twitter--by comparison, more than 50 percent use rival social network Facebook.

Twitter is on pace to generate ad revenues of $150 million in 2011, up from $45 million a year ago, according to research firm eMarketer. But Twitter CEO Dick Costolo maintains an IPO is nowhere on the company's horizon: "We don't need the money. We have more money than we'll need for a long time," he said at the recent Web 2.0 conference.

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