TechCrunch is reporting there’s speculation Apple is reportedly interested in buying Twitter for $700-milllion, although confirming the speculation proved to be difficult.
At some point, Twitter is going to be acquired; it’s just the way of the world when you accept investment from venture capitalists.
And as the number of Twitter users increases and the value of the company appreciates, it will more than likely be a major players (Google, Apple, Microsoft, News Corp., AOL, Yahoo) that eventually acquire Twitter.
But until that happens, Twitter Speculation is going to be a wildly entertaining spectator sport even if a deal isn’t even on the table. Twitter is the belle of the ball, and attracting the most attention from users, blogs, newspapers and the rumor mill.
This is happening at a time when there aren’t a lot of other exciting high-tech stories, which explains why OpenTable has generated so much excitement about possible its IPO.
As for Apple actually buying Twitter, why not?
I mean, anything is possible when you’re Apple and sitting on billions of dollars of iPod/iPhone cash. Why not take a shot at buying the world’s hottest microblogging service to go along with the world’s hottest electronics?
And if anyone can figure out how Twitter can turn itself into a business, Steve Jobs might have some ideas up his magical sleeves.
Update: Reuters reports that Apple has more than $29-billion of cash, or $31/share on its balance sheet. For more thoughts on Twitter’s future, check out BoomTown.
Technorati Tags: apple, steve jobs, twitter
3 Comments
It's not inevitable that Twitter will be purchased wholesale. If the current owners can figure out a way to make money off of it they could take it to IPO themselves (a la google).
In terms of making money from Twitter, I don't think this is such a cryptic conundrum, they're already experimenting with 'ads' on user profiles and it wouldn't take a genius to figure out running contextual ads against search terms could be profitable too.
To my mind the key issues Twitter has to sort out are spam and platform stability.
I agree with Karim. Everything I've heard says Biz and Ev have no urgency to sell for anything less than a billion. There's a potential that literally everyone could have a Twitter account, in the same way they have email accounts. If it's integral to a users web experience, than selling it would be crazy.
PS – it seems like TechCrunch has almost no credibility these days.
agreed