Saudi prince doubles AOL stake to $2bn
Print'Anchor of the industry' gets more wonga
Posted in Music and Media, 2nd November 2000 18:24 GMT
Free whitepaper – Out-of-box comparison between Dell, HP, and IBM blade servers
Royal dotcom stock splurger Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal is at it again - this time he's doubling his stake in AOL to $2 billion.
The nephew of Saudi Arabia's King Fahd described the ISP - whose chairman recently gave $8 million to homophobes by mistake - as the "anchor of the industry".
"America Online is the number one Internet company in the world and has a solid foundation and is making profit. And when the dust settles on the dot-com industry, America Online will be around," the businessman told Reuters.
The Prince is a keen investor in cyberstocks - he has investments in six Internet companies. These include $100 million tied up in e-bidding company Priceline.com, which is due to release its Q3 results today and is expected to record a net loss of about a penny a share.
He said the AOL investment would be gradual and would depend on the price.
In April the Prince said he would be cautious about investing in Internet companies, and would not lose his head over the dotcom frenzy. Last year, Forbes magazine named him the richest businessman outside the US. ®
Related Stories
Saudi prince doubles stake in e-bid biz to $100m
Wall Street savages Priceline.com
AOL-MSN hype war starts
Internet 'bigger than industrial revolution'
Steve Case funds homophobes - by mistake
Free whitepaper – Managing operating systems and applications with the new Dell Management Console
Analyst Keynote: The Register Agile Data Center Summit
Analyst Keynote: The Register Agile Data Center Summit
Enabling The Agile Data Center
Dirty, dirty PCs: The X-rated picture guide
Top 500 supers - rise of the Linux quad-cores
Early adopters bloodied by Ubuntu's Karmic Koala
Sign up, sign up for The Register IT security newsletter