Can Twitter be worth more than Deutsche? On Tuesday, as rumours swirled of possible bidders for the microblogging site, the market was valuing it at $20 billion, compared to $18 billion for the troubled German bank. That might be a reasonable assessment of their relative prospects, or it might be confirmation that social media valuations are always bonkers. You’ll gather from my tone that I’m no Twitter devotee, and am unconvinced by its attractions as a business: it has never made a profit in a decade of existence, has plateaued at around 300 million users (Facebook has 1.7 billion), done little to develop its original offering beyond attracting a global army of trolls, and is threatened by hot competitors such as Snapchat.
But none of that has deterred Disney, Google and the cloud-computing giant Salesforce from lining up as potential buyers.
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