Google unlikely to buy Twitter

Google is unlikely to buy Twitter or any other company in the short term, the search engine's chief executive has said in response to recent speculation.

Monday, 9 March 2009

Eric Schmidt explained in an interview with journalist Charlie Rose that high prices and the current economic situation mean Google is not likely to go after any major acquisitions in the near future.

He said that he believed the economy is in the middle of a cycle and that the company is keeping the significant amounts of cash it is generating in "extremely secure banks".

Schmidt added that the search engine is prepared to "wait that out", going on to state: "From our perspective, I think the YouTube acquisition and the DoubleClick acquisition, which are the two large ones we did last year and the year before, have been phenomenally successful."

His comments came after he told the Morgan Stanley Technology Conference in San Francisco last week that he perceives sites such as Twitter as offering scaled down email functionality and little else.

Meanwhile, Facebook director and investor Peter Thiel recently revealed to BusinessWeek that the social networking website's attempted acquisition of Twitter last year failed as a result of disagreements over price.

Facebook was looking to pay for Twitter in mostly shares, but Twitter rejected the offer due to uncertainties over Facebook's market valuation.

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