Originally published 2022-04-17.
On 14 April 2022, hours after Elon Musk offered to buy Twitter for $54.20 a share, about $43 billion, one of the company's best-known investors turned him down in public. Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal said the price was far below what Twitter was worth. Musk answered with two pointed questions about how much of Twitter the Saudi kingdom owned and what it thought of press freedom.
The exchange became one of the most quoted moments of the takeover battle. It is also a story with an unexpected ending: six months later, the prince who had rejected the bid stayed on as one of the biggest investors in Musk's new Twitter.
What the prince said, and how Musk replied
Alwaleed posted his statement on Twitter on Thursday 14 April, the same day Musk made his offer. Speaking for himself and his investment firm, he wrote:
"Being one of the largest & long-term shareholders of Twitter, @Kingdom_KHC & I reject this offer."
His argument was about price. In his view, $54.20 a share did not come close to Twitter's "intrinsic value" given its growth prospects. To underline his long commitment, he shared an older tweet from 2015 noting that his company's stake had grown to 5.2 percent.
Musk's reply was short and political rather than financial. He asked how much of Twitter the kingdom owned, directly and indirectly, and added:
"What are the Kingdom's views on journalistic freedom of speech?"
Later that day, according to Al Jazeera, he also reacted with a monocle emoji to a post linking a New York Times report on the 2019 US charges against two former Twitter employees accused of spying for Saudi Arabia.
Who is Prince Alwaleed bin Talal?
Alwaleed is a member of the Saudi royal family and one of the Middle East's most prominent investors. He founded Kingdom Holding Company and owns about 95 percent of it. He is a first cousin of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the kingdom's de facto ruler; both are grandsons of the country's founder, King Ibn Saud.
His link to Twitter went back more than a decade. In December 2011 he invested $300 million by buying shares from early insiders, giving Kingdom Holding a stake of more than 3 percent, which later grew. His relationship with the Saudi state has not always been smooth. In November 2017 he was among the princes and businessmen detained at the Ritz-Carlton hotel in Riyadh during an anti-corruption campaign led by the crown prince. No public charges were laid, and he was released in late January 2018 after a financial settlement that The Wall Street Journal put at $6 billion.
Why Musk's questions struck a nerve
Musk's second question pointed at Saudi Arabia's record on journalism. The kingdom tightly controls its media and has been widely criticised over the treatment of dissidents. The most notorious case is the killing of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi, a critic of the crown prince, inside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul on 2 October 2018. His body was dismembered, and its remains have never been found.
In November 2018 the CIA reportedly concluded with "high confidence" that Mohammed bin Salman ordered the killing, and a declassified US intelligence report released in February 2021 blamed him for approving the operation. Saudi authorities deny that he ordered it; the crown prince has said he bears responsibility because it happened "under his watch". A Saudi court jailed eight people in 2020 in proceedings that a UN special rapporteur called a mockery of justice.
The espionage case Musk alluded to added a Twitter-specific angle. US prosecutors had accused two former Twitter staff of passing private user information to Saudi Arabia, so questions about Saudi influence over the platform were not new.
Musk's case for buying Twitter
Musk laid out his reasons the same day in an interview at the TED2022 conference in Vancouver. He insisted the bid was not about making money, saying he could afford it but did not see Twitter as a way to earn a return. His concern, he said, was trust in a platform where so much public debate now happens:
"Twitter has become kind of the de facto town square."
He suggested making Twitter's ranking algorithm open source to guard against hidden manipulation, letting users edit their posts, and fighting spam and fraud more aggressively. Asked what he would do if the board said no, he said he had a "Plan B" but would not describe it.
The worries about one man owning a platform
Critics saw the bid differently. Musk was already one of the world's richest people, and many commentators worried that personal control of a major social network would hand him outsized influence over politics in the United States and abroad.
His own use of Twitter fed those concerns. In July 2020 a user accused the US of organising the 2019 ousting of Bolivia's president Evo Morales to secure the country's lithium. Musk replied, "We will coup whoever we want. Deal with it." The post was deleted within days and he gave no public explanation. Many read it as a provocative joke rather than a real call for a coup, but it is still cited as an example of how loosely he used his platform. There is no public record that Tesla bought lithium from Bolivia, so that part of the online claim does not hold up.
From critic to co-owner: what happened next
The takeover fight moved quickly. Twitter's board adopted a "poison pill" defence on 15 April, then unanimously accepted a $44 billion deal on 25 April. In July Musk tried to walk away, Twitter sued him in Delaware, and in October he agreed to complete the purchase at the original price. The deal closed on 27 October 2022 and Musk became owner and chief executive.
Alwaleed's objection did not last. Kingdom Holding and the prince's private office rolled Twitter shares worth $1.89 billion into the new private company, making them together its second-largest investor after Musk. The prince congratulated the "Chief Twit" and said the move fitted his firm's long-term strategy. In 2023 Twitter was rebranded as X.
What the episode shows
- A rejection is often a negotiating position. Alwaleed argued the price was too low, then backed the deal once it was done.
- Ownership questions matter for platforms. Musk's jab about Saudi influence was rhetorical, but who owns a social network and what they want from it are fair questions for any user.
- Public spats are not the deal terms. The insults made headlines; the binding numbers were in the merger agreement and the later share rollovers.
Sources: Al Jazeera, 15 April 2022; Al Jazeera, 28 October 2022; Wikipedia: Acquisition of Twitter by Elon Musk; Wikipedia: Al-Waleed bin Talal; Wikipedia: Assassination of Jamal Khashoggi; ForkLog: Musk explains why he wants to buy Twitter; Truth or Fiction: Musk's deleted Bolivia tweet; original reporting by The Daily Mail and NewsBytes.
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