would be for Disney. Such a deal would be likely to raise concerns about the value of Twitter itself: would other media giants be willing to put as much effort into Twitter if it were owned by a rival?
Marc Benioff, the maverick founder of Salesforce, started his company at the peak of the dotcom bubble and has turned it into a challenger to Microsoft and Oracle in selling internet software to businesses.
Its cloud computing tools allow companies to manage customer service and marketing campaigns – two major priorities at Twitter – and buying the company would give Salesforce an enormous store of data it could use to train artificial intelligence software.
But an acquisition might be held back by the companies' sizes. With a market valuation of $45bn (which has fallen in recent days as investors voice their disapproval of a potential deal), buying Twitter would be more like a merger for Salesforce, and a risky bet on such a deal paying off. It’s unclear if the benefits of a tie-up would be worth it.
Then again, Benioff has been willing to take such risks before. He wanted to buy LinkedIn before Microsoft swooped in with its $26.2bn offer in June.
Microsoft, which beat Salesforce to LinkedIn, is reportedly weighing a bid. While a merger with LinkedIn may have more chance of building asocial network that can compete with Facebook, Microsoft’s efforts these days are in its enterprise business, making a consumer media offering
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