Saudi Arabia’s billionaire Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, who is a shareholder in Twitter through his investing firm Kingdom Holding Company, has publicly declared his support for Elon Musk’s takeover of the social networking giant.
In his latest post on Twitter, Prince Alwaleed said that he – along with the Kingdom Holding Company – will roll out approximately $1.9 billion into the “new” Twitter, which at the offer price equates to approximately 35 million shares.
“Great to connect with you my ‘new’ friend @elonmusk,” the Saudi Prince tweeted. “I believe you will be an excellent leader for Twitter to propel & maximise its great potential.”
This comes weeks after Prince Alwaleed rejected Elon Musk’s offer to buy 100 percent of the social networking firm. Musk had offered $43 billion in cash to take over the site on 14 April, but Prince Alwaleed said that his offer failed to represent the long-term value of Twitter.
“I don’t believe that the proposed offer by @elonmusk ($54.20) comes close to the intrinsic value of @Twitter given its growth prospects,” Prince Alwaleed had said in his previous Tweet.
Prince Alwaleed’s firm was a very early investor of the firm, investing $300 million in the company for a 3 percent stake in December 2011 before the firm listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 2013. The Prince later increased his stake in the firm through a Kingdom Holding purchase in 2015, and now owns more than 5 percent of the firm.
Binance backs Elon Musk’s $44 billion deal to buy Twitter
Cryptocurrency exchange platform Binance Holdings has committed $500 million towards Elon Musk’s proposed takeover of Twitter Inc as part of its strategy to bring social media and news sites into the world of Web3.
Binance’s decision adds to a number of individuals and firms who have supported the proposed $44 billion takeover of the firm, including Oracle founder Larry Ellison, the Qatar sovereign wealth fund’s Qatar Holding LLC, Sequoia Capital Fund, and Brookfield Asset Management, among others.
“We’re excited to be able to help Elon realise a new vision for Twitter,” Changpeng Zhao, chief executive officer of Binance, said in a statement to Bloomberg.
“We hope to be able to play a role in bringing social media and web3 together and broadening the use and adoption of crypto and blockchain technology.”
Binance is creating an internal team to focus on how blockchain could be helpful to the firm and other social platforms, and has brought up BNB Chain – a distributed ledger Binance helped to build – to Musk and his team, Bloomberg reported.
