Salesforce.com Inc. (NYSE: CRM) has become the latest tech darling to enter the Wall Street rumor mill. After reports a week ago about the company hiring bankers to evaluate offers, the debate was about whether it was Microsoft Corp. (NASDAQ: MSFT) or Oracle Corp. (NYSE: ORCL) that was most interested in acquiring the company.

While Bloomberg has now reported that Microsoft is mulling a buyout offer for Salesforce.com, the real question that investors are going to want to answer, outside of who would buy it, is how much an acquisition can really fetch for Salesforce.com shareholders.

24/7 Wall St. thinks it will be a value of $80 a share that gets Salesforce.com acquired. How we got to that number requires more ambitious math than we would dare feel comfortable with. That being said, the Wall Street rumor mill pushes out names left and right — logic and reality in real world prices may not always have a part of what the rest of us consider reality.

The first thing that has to be considered is an acquirer’s balance sheet, and of course its market cap to some degree. Oracle just recently raised $10 billion in debt capital, with several more billion available to the company via credit lines. Before taking the new debt capital into consideration, Oracle’s last cash balance was almost $44 billion, when you add cash, cash equivalents and short-term investments. Microsoft’s most recent balance sheet had more than $107 billion in cash, cash equivalents and investments.

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SAP AG (NYSE: SAP) was named as a potential suitor as well, and someone even threw out the name of International Business Machines Corp. (NYSE: IBM) as a would-be suitor. The problem today is that Salesforce.com’s market cap is $47 billion. One of the IBM officers was reportedly laughing about the possibility of spending up for it, but it has a market cap of $170 billion — along with a more leveraged balance sheet compared to most tech giants today.

As far as SAP, it is worth $89 billion in market cap. It had less than $5 billion in cash at the end of 2014. It just doesn’t fit here, at least not logically. Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOGL) was also named as a potential buyer, but this just makes less sense on the surface, even with a $370 billion market cap and even with a cash arsenal that is nearing $70 billion.

If there are two companies that would dare to try acquire Salesforce.com, it would boil down to Microsoft and Oracle. As far as how much, investors need to keep in mind that Salesforce.com has traded at 100 times earnings expectations for longer than memory serves. In fact, the next premium price puts it valued at 107 times expected January 2016 fiscal earnings and 81 times January 2017 fiscal earnings.

In order to preserve this notion of 100 times forward earnings, we are going to look at what 100 times a blended forward earnings and revenues would look like. This is $0.80 per share on a blended basis for forward expectations, and that means 100 times that earnings number would be $80.00, before any discounting of shares. That would imply a market cap of almost $51 billion — and a blended revenue figure of the next two years, considering that some 20% revenue growth is expected, would generate $7.2 billion or so in a blended yearly revenue. That means a buyer would be paying 7.2 times annual sales.

With a $391 billion market cap, Microsoft is valued at about four times next year’s expected revenues. With a $192 billion market cap, Oracle is valued at just under five times next year’s expected revenues.

Whichever company buys Salesforce.com, it is going to be a very expensive acquisition and almost certainly will be heavily dilutive against earnings. Paying 100 times earnings, after all, means that based on the business today and discounting any future growth at all means that it is paying for the earnings stream out to the year 2115 or so. That is not the right way to think about it, of course, but that is some perspective to at least consider.

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Can Salesforce.com fetch $80 per share in a buyout? Sure, if the buyer believes it can garner far larger profitable sales and market share from the deal. Spending this much just to increase competitive pressures against Satya Nadella or Larry Ellison is a high-stakes poker game that just has too high of a buy-in for most companies to be able to get in on.

With shares having gone as high as $76 on Tuesday, and then settling back around $74, Salesforce.com has a 52-week range of $49.18 to $78.46 and a consensus analyst price target of $76.30. The median price target is actually $80, and the highest analyst price target now is all the way up at $95.

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