‘The bird is freed’: Al Waleed Bin Talal joins Musk in new Twitter company

Saudi billionaire Al Waleed Bin Talal, one of the owners of Twitter, joined the new private Twitter company announced by Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk after acquiring the world’s most famous micro-blogging site.

This was reported on Friday in a statement by the Kingdom Holding Company (KHC) and the private office of Prince Al Waleed Bin Talal.

KHC and the private office of Al Waleed Bin Talal announced the transfer of their stake in the current Twitter shares, amounting to 34,948,975 shares valued at $1.89 billion, to the new Twitter company led by Musk.

The statement added that KHC and the private office of Prince Al Waleed Bin Talal are the second largest shareholders after Musk.

Earlier, Bin Talal expressed his belief that Musk would be an excellent leader and maximise Twitter’s potential.

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This comes after a rejection of a previous offer by Musk to buy Twitter, as the Saudi prince responded: “The offer is not close to the intrinsic value of Twitter.”

On Thursday, Musk announced his acquisition of the Twitter platform for $44 billion and immediately dismissed Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal, CFO Ned Segal and Legal Officer Vijaya Gadde.

Musk was required to finish the deal by Friday, otherwise, he would have faced court in November for failing to implement the initial agreement signed with Twitter.

“The bird is freed,” Musk later tweeted, referring to the platform’s logo.

In April, Musk signed a $44 billion deal to buy Twitter before backing down from it in July, accusing the platform of lying about the proportion of fake accounts and spam messages.

He argued that the group “practised deception” by intentionally increasing the number of accounts from which it could generate revenue.

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