Prince Alwaleed

So the Saudis have invested $300m in Twitter, and interestingly in a secondary sale. But why would you want to buy shares in the very company that had such a prominent role in the Arab Spring?

Prince Alwaleed, the awesome looking guy in the picture, was quick to report that the investment is not political. Looking over the investments of Alwaleed's empire, one can understand why some people would be suspicious. It include controlling stakes in two Lebanon based media companies, a key propaganda battleground in the Saudi's rapidly deteriorating relationship with Syria. He has also made sizable investment in , and pledged his continual support of, Murdock's News Corporation, an organisation well known for its meddling in political affairs and currently the object of the largest hacking scandal in UK history. So although one can't determine that the Prince's investments are politically motivated, we can certainly conclude he is not averse to it either. However as an investor in my beloved Canary Wharf, I am prepared to give him the benefit of doubt.

According to wikipedia, Alwaleed's Kingdom holdings international investments include (or have included)

• Amazon 
• AOL/Time Warner 
• Apple Inc. 
• Canary Wharf 
• Citigroup 
• Coca Cola 
• Compaq
• Disneyland Paris 
• eBay 
• Four Seasons Hotels & Resorts 
• Fairmont Hotels & Resorts 
• Ford 
• Hotel George V, Paris 
• Hewlett-Packard 
• McDonald's 
• Motorola 
• Mövenpick Hotels & Resorts 
• News Corporation 
• PepsiCo 
• Priceline.com Inc 
• Procter & Gamble 
• The Walt Disney Company 
• Twitter 
• LBCI Lebanese Broadcasting Corporation International 
• SAMBA, Saudi American Bank 
• Rotana Group (Arabic: روتانا‎), the Arab World's largest entertainment company 

And let the above be a lesson to you America, if you borrow foreign money to over-consume for a few more decades, eventually 100% of all your priced assets will end up on foreign hands. I wonder what the new Coke logo will look like, or the theme of the next Disney movie?