The difference between a version of Twitter Inc. (NYSE: TWTR) that was going to be sold to Walt Disney Co. (NYSE: DIS), Salesforce.com Inc. (NASDAQ: CRM) or Alphabet Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOGL) and one with no buyer is about $8 billion. That is result of a share price that has plunged from nearly $26 to just above $16 between October 5 and October 15.
Salesforce.com was Twitter’s last best hope. The enterprise cloud company’s founder reversed his position that Twitter would make a good fit. According to MarketWatch:
Salesforce.com Inc. Chief Executive Marc Benioff is not exactly known to be shy and retiring, but on Friday, he made a bold statement to the Financial Times that the cloud-based software company had looked at buying Twitter Inc., only to conclude that it was not a good idea. “In this case, we’ve walked away,” Benioff told the FT, in comments that fueled a drop in Twitter’s stock TWTR, -5.12% and a surge in the stock of Salesforce.com CRM, +5.15% “It wasn’t the right fit for us.” Investors breathed a sigh of relief but were probably also thinking, “told you so.” After the initial reports of Benioff’s interest in Twitter last month, the deal was panned by almost everyone, from Wall Street analysts
The action by Salesforce.com begs the question of how many top tier tech execs, how many investment bankers, how many analysts could have been wrong about the potential of one or the other Twitter marriages being made in heaven.
The answer really doesn’t matter to the people who lost that $8 billion.
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