Nick Bilton on Twitter as an Acquisition

Nick Bilton, writing for The Hive:

What happens next to Twitter is anyone’s guess. But I do know that, for the first time, Twitter now has a Plan B. A few months ago, while reporting a feature story about the future on the company for Vanity Fair, I asked a number of executives what might happen if Dorsey, who seemed like a Hail Mary option, couldn’t turn Twitter around. What was Plan B, I asked them? “There is no Plan B,” I was told. “This is it.”

I admired their fortitude, but there was no denying that an acquisition had to be the next option on the table. And one executive humored me in a guessing game about who the dream buyer might be. But after I ticked off all the usual suspects — Yahoo, Google, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft — that tried to buy Twitter years ago, in one way or another, I was met with the same resounding answer: “no.”

“Then who?” I asked this executive.

To which the executive replied, elusively, “It’s a small world after all.”

★ Monday, 3 October 2016