Saudi Prince Buys AOL and Priceline

Yahoo ^ | 3/11/02 | Reuters

[Clara Lou]

DUBAI (Reuters) - Saudi billionaire Prince Alwaleed has bought more than $1 billion worth of shares in Citigroup, AOL Time Warner and Priceline.com over the past six months, his company said on Monday.
The prince, among the world's wealthiest men, bought $500 million in Citigroup, $450 million in AOL Time Warner and $100 million in Priceline.com. With around $10 billion in Citigroup, Alwaleed was already the biggest shareholder in the bank.
"At about $43, Citi's share price was at too attractive a price," the prince said in a statement issued by his company Kingdom Holdings.
The statement said the prince also found AOL Time Warner price attractive at $23 a share.
"I believe in the power of the AOL brand and I am already a shareholder in this global media giant. Therefore when the price reached a lucrative level, we decided to increase our stake," the prince said, without giving exact figures on his AOL holdings.
He also described Priceline.com as one of the few Internet companies that "survived the turbulence witnessed by the Internet arena."
His holdings in Internet commerce company Priceline.com currently stand at 5.4 percent, he added.
Alwaleed, a nephew of Saudi Arabia's King Fahd, has a personal fortune estimated at $20 billion, the bulk of which is invested in the United States.

[youaculpa]

To switch from AOL IM don't switch to MSN. Try out jabber. It's an OpenSource instant messenger that speaks to AOL/MSN/Yahoo/IRC as well as "native" Jabber servers. It works great. Check it out at http://www.jabbercentral.org There are Jabber clients for Windows/Mac/Linux/PalmPilot/etc.

[Bush2000]

It wasn't long ago that "Prince" Alaweed (aka camel jockey with an appropriated title) was touted as a brilliant investor on Wall Street, and he coyly suggested that he had some kind of special system for picking stocks. Of course, that was back in the days when you could invest in practically any tech investment and show a 30 to 50% gain. Last I heard, Alaweed's portfolio had dropped by 50%. He won't be crying poor anytime soon ... but, then again, he's no longer looked upon as some kind of savant.

[Bush2000]

Well I hope you sell high, but AOL Time-Warner is about as disgusting as it can get.

AOL is a gutter stock. I wouldn't touch it. It has very few opportunities for growth. Even before the merger Time-Warner was stagnant. AOL was supposed to infuse TW by providing alternate outlets for selling and distributed content -- most importantly through broadband. AOL-TW executives had dreams of selling consumers broadband, pay-per-view programs from their video library and other types of merchandise. So far, it hasn't turned out that way. AOL has been blocked from significant chunks of the broadband market, there was an article yesterday detailing how its supposed 34M subscriber roll is packed with freeloaders paying nothing for service, subscriber churn is getting worse, and it doesn't look like the "convergence thing" is working out as planned. Caveat emptor.

[RedBloodedAmerican]

A better title would have been "AOL Comes Out Of The Closet"