The man who invested $300 million in Twitter last month likes to call himself “the Warren Buffett of the Middle East” and has a knack for investing in U.S. companies just before they take off, according to a Business Insider Profile.
Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Bin Abdulaziz Alsaud is also the second biggest investor in Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp., which may explain why Murdoch opened a Twitter account at the end of 2011 and, more recently, has been making comments about how News Corp. “screwed up” MySpace.
So far, Murdoch has declined comment on why he started tweeting through a spokesperson and Alwaleed, in a text message to Forbes, could only speculate on why Murdoch joined the microblogging service.
“We did talk and exchange messages but not on Twitter,” Alwaleed said.
Alwaleed started on the path to becoming number 26 on Forbes list of billionaires with a $590 million, 1991 investment in Citibank, which was struggling at the time. That was followed by taking a stake in Apple just before Steve Jobs engineered the company’s resurgence.
When he hasn’t been getting in political dust-ups on his new obsession, Murdoch has been making some interesting revelations on Twitter, including yesterday’s tweet which amounted to his first public social media post about News Corp.’s role in MySpace’s decline.
“Many questions and jokes about My Space.simple answer – we screwed up in every way possible, learned lots of valuable expensive lesson,” Murdoch tweeted from the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas on Thursday.
