Twitter Spikes Up On Yet Another Takeout Rumor

Shares of Twitter Inc TWTR gained 21.42 percent on Friday trading, driven by yet another rumor about the company being in takeover talks. Potential suitors allegedly include Alphabet Inc GOOGL GOOG and salesforce.com, inc. CRM.

A representative for Twitter has declined to comment, while Google did not respond to requests for commentary.

Only Salesforce spokeswoman Jane Hyne answered. “We do not comment on rumors and speculation,” she said.

Despite this is all speculation so far, Citi's Walter Pritchard already weighed in on the issue, explaining why the deal would not make sense for salesforce.

While Twitter is involved in the customer service process, we don’t believe it is necessary for salesforce to own Twitter to be able to use it as a medium for customer service. Also, we don’t believe that if someone else bought Twitter, salesforce would be prevented from using Twitter as they do today. Our response, if CRM were to buy TWTR, would be negative. Twitter is profitable and while back of the envelope the deal might not be dilutive, we believe it would fuel concerns that CRM is de-focusing on for “customer” area in a quest to stretch for growth.

Twitter is simultaneously working on a restructuring that could include divestitures and redundancies as it struggles to drive user growth.

Disclosure: Javier Hasse holds no interest in any of the securities or entities mentioned above.