After “several months of negotiations,” Saudi prince and business tycoon Alwaleed bin Talal has purchased a $300 million stake in Twitter.

The chairman of Kingdom Holding Company, who Arabian Business named World’s Richest Arab yesterday, is worth some $21.3 billion and has had a busy year.

Arabian Business reports:

The prince, who signed a deal with Bloomberg in September to launch his own news channel, saw his wealth rise by 4.4 percent over the course of 2011.

Kingdom Holding, which is 95 percent owned by the prince, is building the tallest tower in the world in Jeddah at a cost of SR4.6bn ($1.23bn). Work on the 1,000m superscraper is set to begin in January, the architects behind the project said in November.

Twitter said its presence has grown some 240 percent in the Kingdom over the past year, but penetration still remains under 1 percent.

At more than 8 percent, Qatar remains the Arab country with the most Twitter penetration.

Forbes reports:

Prince Alwaleed does not use Twitter – his favorite mode of communication is texting – but his wife, Princess Ameerah Al-Taweel, is a regular user and has more than 81,000 followers on the site, which allows people to broadcast messages up to 140 characters in length…

“We believe that social media will fundamentally change the media industry landscape in the coming years. Twitter will capture and monetize this positive trend,” said Ahmed Halawani, the Executive Director of private equity and international investments at Kingdom Holding.