The emotional roller coaster that is Twitter’s future seems to have hit a new low today as Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff tells the Financial Times his company has “walked away” from making a bid to buy it.
If you’re keeping track, that’s now… pretty much everyone who’s said they’re not interested in buying Twitter. Neither Google nor Disney plan to bid on Twitter, despite reports saying both were interested. Recode says that Apple is likely also out of the picture. And Verizon immediately dismissed speculation that it was considering a bid.
Facebook is also said to be uninterested, according to CNBC. And while Microsoft’s name has been tossed around, no one seems to think the acquisition would make any sense for an increasingly enterprise-focused company.
So it very much sounds like no one is going to make a bid on Twitter this week. Which means that the possibility of a Twitter acquisition, at least for now, appears to be over.
That’s going to put even more pressure on Twitter to figure out a way to restart user growth, which has ranged from “stalled” to “slow” over the past year. Twitter’s revenue has also been growing slowly, and it’s unclear if its new embrace of live video — like streaming NFL games and the presidential debates — has been helping.
Twitter will update investors on its earnings again two weeks from now, on October 27th, and it’s likely the company will either address or be asked about where acquisition talks go from here.