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Salesforce is not going to buy Twitter, CEO Marc Benioff told the Financial Times.
“In this case we’ve walked away. It wasn’t the right fit for us,” Benioff told the FT. “It’s not the right fit for us for many different reasons ... You’re going to look at price, you’re going to look at culture, you’re going to look at everything.”
Salesforce joins a growing list of companies that showed interest in acquiring Twitter over the past six weeks but have since bowed out. Google, Disney and Apple also took a look at Twitter and decided not to bid.
It’s not clear now if anyone wants to buy Twitter, which puts more pressure on the company to figure out what it really wants to be and how it’ll become profitable. Twitter is making a big push to become a live-video distributor, but that business is still new and unproven. Twitter needs time to revamp its business, which may be why people aren’t bidding.
It’s certainly possible a mystery bidder could materialize, but most believe Twitter is simply too expensive for any suitor to stomach. (That doesn’t include other issues, like the fact that Twitter still isn’t profitable and is no longer growing.)
Without anyone coming to Twitter’s rescue, expect the pressure on CEO Jack Dorsey to ratchet up. Twitter has lost 37 percent of its market value since Dorsey was formally appointed as CEO last October. And the fact that he is simultaneously running another public company, Square, will likely be a point of contention moving forward if Twitter doesn’t report solid earnings later this month.
Twitter stock was down as much as 7 percent on the news that Salesforce wasn’t bidding. Salesforce stock, on the other hand, was up 6 percent.
Update: A Twitter spokesperson declined to comment.
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
