Must be nice to have all those billions of dollars at one’s disposal, especially when work was not a necessary instrument in acquiring the wealth. Needless to say all of this money can also buy beautiful women, as is evident from the photograph.
These rich Arabs who just happen to be sitting on enormous oil deposits can buy all they want, but all their countries “generate” is sand and oil. As for the people, they invent nothing, manufacture nothing, create nothing.
If not for the oil, these lands would be known as “Afghanistan West.” TGO
Refer to story below. Source: Associated Press
AFP
Saudi billionaire Prince Walid bin Talal and his Kingdom Holding Company announced a combined investment of $300 million in the social networking site Twitter, in a statement Monday.
“Our investment in Twitter reaffirms our ability in identifying suitable opportunities to invest in promising, high-growth businesses with a global impact,” Prince Walid said in the statement released on Kingdom Holding’s website.
The statement said that the investment was finalised after “several months of negotiations” and represented a “strategic stake” in the social networking site.
Prince Walid, a media mogul and one of the world’s richest men, in September announced plans to launch Alarab, a pan-Arab news channel, by 2012, saying the television network will promote freedom of speech.
Social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook played a crucial role in spreading information and organising protests in the revolutions that have rocked the Arab world since January.
In Syria today, where the international press has been banned from reporting on the uprising against the regime’s bloody crackdown on demonstrators, activists use Twitter, Facebook and other websites to get news on their struggle to the outside world.
“We believe that social media will fundamentally change the media industry landscape in the coming years,” said Ahmed Halawani, Kingdom Holding’s executive director for private equity and international investments.
Kingdom Holding owns 29.9 percent of the shares in the Saudi Research and Marketing Group, which publishes several leading newspapers and magazines, including the Asharq Al-Awsat newspaper and Al Eqtisadieh.
Arabic language tweets have risen sharply since the Arab Spring uprisings, with two million tweets per day recorded in October 2011, compared with only 99,000 tweets per day at the same time last year, according to a November study by Semiocast, an institute that studies social networks.
Arabic is now the eighth most used language on Twitter, registering a 22-fold increase in the number of daily tweets since October 2010, according to the study.
