Twitter continues to inch its way to a sale process, and the latest developments come in the form of alleged bids from potential buyers. Today CNBC is reporting, and we have also independently heard, that both Google and Salesforce are interested in buying the company. We have additionally heard that Microsoft and Verizon have also been knocking, although right now Verizon (which also owns AOL, which owns us), may have a little too much on its plate.

Twitter currently has a market cap of $13.3 billion, and it opened for trading today with a jump of nearly 22%, in response to all these whispers.

Google, Microsoft and Verizon have been reported as potential suitors in the past (one recent article here), and what we’re hearing about the Microsoft interest is that it, in part, is an attempt by the company to drive the price up and keep it out of Salesforce’s hands. That begs another point, though: Of the three companies that we’ve heard about, the one that might be most surprising as a suitor is Salesforce.

Salesforce currently has around half of the current market cap of Twitter in its own cash reserves, meaning that if it acquired the company, it would need to raise the remainder elsewhere if it’s an all-cash deal, or it would need to make the rest of the purchase in shares. It would be the highest-ever acquisition by the very acquisitive Salesforce, which has already spent more than $4 billion on acquisitions in the first six months of this year.

Then again, it tried, but missed out, on buying LinkedIn (which Microsoft is picking up for $26.2 billion).

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