Of late, Twitter has been struggling with slowing user growth, falling stock value, and has been a feeding ground for vicious online abuse to maintain its place among the social- media giants it’s competing with. Nevertheless, it seems that Salesforce’s Chief Digital Evangelist, Vala Afshar has a possible explanation behind their company’s interest in Twitter.
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Ever since the news of report from CNBC broke out, Twitter’s stock soared about 22 percent in early trading Friday, giving the company a market value of more than $16 billion.
Representatives for Salesforce, Alphabet and Twitter declined to comment.
TechCrunch also said, citing its own sources, that bids from Verizon and Microsoft to acquire Twitter are also coming in. Google has been connected over the past year to a potential purchase of the social media company. Salesforce shares fell more than 3%, while Alphabet dipped around 0.25%.
The suiters courting Twitter are said to be interested in the data the company generates from its 313 million active users. Former Google executive Omid Kordestani is the executive chairman of Twitter.
Salesforce, meanwhile, is not exactly a household name – the US-based company operates in cloud computing for businesses and customer service platforms. Twitter missed Wall Street’s sales expectations in both the first and second quarters of 2016, according to Thomson Reuters StarMine, and has yet to produce a net profit in 11 quarters as a public company. Recent moves to be a big entity in live video, including a deal to broadcast National Football League games, are too new to be reflected in user growth or ad sales. Twitter is also working with Goldman on options besides a full sale, like a divestiture of non-core assets, one of the other people said.
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Later, he noted that he has tweeted his “personal views regarding ‘Why Twitter?'” several times over the last few years.
