The total shares under Prince Alwaleed and his company also include the shares bought in 2011, before Twitter’s initial public offering (IPO) in 2013.
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Twitter co-founder Evan Williams is the tech firm’s largest shareholder with a 6.9 percent stake.
Kingdom Holding has paid US$50mil (RM211.01mil) to double its stake in the microblogging site to 0.72%, the Riyadh-based company said in a separate bourse statement.
Prince Al-Waleed invested both personal funds and via the Kingdom Holding Company sovereign wealth fund.
The combined holding makes the prince and his investment company the second largest investors in Twitter with 35 million shares, a stake whose market value is worth almost 900 million euros.
In an SEC filing dated Tuesday, the prince and Kingdom Holding (of which he is a 95 percent owner) reported owning 34,948,975 shares of Twitter, or 5.17 percent of the entire company. The stock traded downwards over heavy volume yesterday, as it slumped almost 2% to close at $27.72.
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The news broke just days after Twitter named Jack Dorsey as its permanent CEO and months after Alwaleed voiced his opposition to him taking over. He has been running Twitter on an interim basis since Dick Costolo resigned in June. According to the Twitter’s blog, users will now see a new lightning bolt shaped tab on their screens, which if clicked upon would allow them to discover global stories live.
