Never mind that Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, the Saudi investor whose Kingdom Holding investment firm has stakes in Apple, Citigroup, and now, 3% ownership of Twitter, isn't a big user of the service himself (Prince Alwaleed follows just 25 users with his account - including Fox News and Barack Obama - and he hasn't tweeted since Oct. 6 when he sent out RIP condolences to Steve Jobs).
Arabic is the fastest growing language used on Twitter and the company has gotten credit for playing a role in the Arab Spring uprisings in Northern Africa and the Middle East earlier this year, and that makes Prince Alwaleed's investment significant.
"Kingdom realizes the importance of social networks like Twitter and their future growth prospects, and decided to benefit from this trend," Samer Darwiche, an analyst at Gulfmena Investments in Dubai, told Bloomberg News.
The investment was confirmed by a Twitter spokesman, but the company declined to give further details.
Twitter, which remains a private company, was valued at $8 billion in August. A series of recent management shakeups and staff departures has had some speculating that the company is growing through some growing pains, but other see it as an attempt to solidify its engineering talent and prep the company for more growth and, perhaps, an initial public stock offering.
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