I think Bloomberg LP is actually a good candidate for buying Twitter. Bloomberg already dominates the business-data and financial-news space. Twitter could be their channel for consumers. They could take Twitter private, and reduce the market pressure for quarterly metrics. Leverage their in-house technology to cut operational costs. And feed data from Twitter into their terminals for consumption by financial markets where appropriate.
To be honest, I would much rather Microsoft buy Twitter than Google. Microsoft actually is showing they have learned from their mistakes...while Google quietly continues to make theirs.
Though to me it would make more sense if Twitter were a joint venture between various media outlets, sort of like how Hulu was funded initially. News Corp, Viacom, Disney, etc all buying large stakes in the company and taking it private to me is the best possible outcome.
It's not an obvious good idea to buy Twitter though - and is especially risky if you're not wanting to just continue to run the business as is without potentially de-stabilizing it and destroying it in the process.
Twitter doesn't have the balance sheet for a leveraged buyout. No hard assets and money-losing.
Google or Facebook could buy Twitter for cash, but it's not clear it would be a good investment. It would be better to wait for Twitter to fail and then pick up the pieces at a huge discount.
I know it's the huge growth story that wallstreet seeks but it's an invaluable resource, Twitter is. It should be bought by one of the big 5 tech firms if just to keep it alive in the public interest.
I too was thinking this, does this mean a future acquisition is not out of the question? Frankly, I find a Google owned Twitter to be a terrifying prospect. Not that Jack is doing a great job there...but I'd much rather they be owned by multiple companies in a partnership than by one company. Twitter, imo, is far far more powerful than Facebook in driving world events given the leadership and journalists on the platform.
If Google were to buy Twitter, they wouldn't do it because they want Twitter's content or community, they'd do it to merge Twitter's single-digit display ad share with theirs and defensively eliminate a future competitor. I feel they have no more interest in Twitter than does Facebook.
Twitter acquired Crashlytics, and they released Fabric.io as a "Twitter Inside" SDK to entice app developers to Twitter integration and its MoPub ad network. This is their big push to beat out Facebook and live inside every app, but Google already plays this game, and Twitter isn't yet a huge threat to them. Either Google or Facebook could buy them defensively, but they need not at this time. (I feel that Microsoft's purchase of LinkedIn was also defensive, but that's a different story.)
Verizon, on the other hand, could buy Twitter. They bought AOL to enter the content creation market, and they could cement their share. Or more likely, they could instead buy Yahoo, and with it Tumblr, on the cheap.
Amazon could buy Twitter. They bought Twitch, and they could use Twitter to expand their social presence, logged-in time, and display ad share.
Yandex could buy Twitter. They would break into the US and Japanese market in a huge way. The Fabric.io SDK would be a perfect fit to drive more engagement from apps to their properties.
Twitter are NOT worth investing from if you take them in isolation. If you're investing in companies because you believe they will become big profitable companies then Twitter as an investment is quite absurd.
The only reason they ARE worth investing in is because collectively investors and would be acquirers believe they are.
Definitely investing in Twitter is a good bet because they'll likely get bought by some silly bigco.
One thing said in the article that I also agree with, is that it seems almost inevitable that Google will buy Twitter eventually. Seems like such a good fit.
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