There’s been speculation about a possible Twitter sale for a while now amid less-than-stellar revenue growth. CNBC did not immediately receive a comment from the companies involved.
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Twitter shares surged 21 percent to $22.62 on Friday after CNBC reported the company has received expressions of interest from several technology or media companies and may get a formal bid shortly. Google aspires to be the main provider of information, and the rise of social media in the form of Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat and others has created a massive source of new data that is mostly out of the reach of its search engine. Former Google executive Omid Kordestani is the executive chairman of Twitter. Bloomberg reported Friday that Goldman Sachs is helping Twitter talk to potential buyers.
TechCrunch also said, citing its own sources, that bids from Verizon and Microsoft to acquire Twitter are also coming in. That’s slightly surprising as Salesforce “has virtually no presence in consumer media”, instead focusing on “cloud-based computing services”.
But a recent presentation about its new “Einstein” artificial intelligence platform provided a peak at how Twitter could fit into the company’s strategy.
“Twitter certainly has value if someone runs the company to maximize profitability”, Pachter said.
Twitter could provide Salesforce with similar benefits to LinkedIn. Twitter a year ago added Omid Kordestani, a former Google executive, as an executive chairman of its board. “I simply love Twitter”, he said. Both now boast more users than Twitter by most measures even though they are much newer, and advertisers have begun to migrate their ad dollars accordingly.
Mr Costolo, who had been chief executive from 2010, was under pressure from investors unhappy with the firm’s performance.
The company’s flagging performance has also spurred talk of a takeover. Twitter has 313 million monthly users, up just 3% from a year ago.
In April, Twitter signed a deal with the NFL to live stream Thursday night football games.
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Twitter went public in November 2013 at $26 a share. From then through Thursday’s close at $18.63, the stock had lost three-quarters of its value.
