Salesforce will take a pass on buying Twitter, according to a Financial Times report on Friday quoting Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff.
“In this case, we’ve walked away. It wasn’t the right fit for us,” Benioff told FT.
Twitter shares fell more than 6 percent on the news.
At this point, one almost has to feel sorry for the San Francisco-based company. Other potential buyers, including Disney and Google, have declined to bid for it. Recode says Apple is likely out of the picture. Facebook is uninterested, according to CNBC. And no other prospective buyer has appeared, FT noted.
Benioff came under pressure from his shareholders over the potential deal, as they questioned why a software-as-a-service company would want to buy a consumer internet company in need of repair. Under Benioff’s leadership, Salesforce has been on an acquisition jag, buying nine companies this year and five in 2015, according to CrunchBase.
Twitter is scheduled to announce its quarterly earnings Oct. 27 and will likely address the matter of acquisition, or its alternatives, at that time.
The company’s shares skyrocketed 21 percent upon reports it was putting itself up for sale earlier this fall. One problem has been that even 10 years after its founding, Twitter can’t decide whether it’s a media or a technology company, a Bloomberg report said last month. Its growth has stalled, it doesn’t generate much revenue per user and it’s never turned a profit, another Bloomberg story noted.
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