Twitter confirms purported US$31bil Bloomberg story is fake

NEW YORK: A report claiming that Twitter Inc received an offer to be acquired for $31 billion attributed to Bloomberg LP is fake, Twitter and a spokesman for the news and financial data provider said on Tuesday.

Twitter shares jumped on the report, which was distributed on the Internet and closely resembled Bloomberg's news website. Its origins could not be immediately established.

The report appeared on a site called bloomberg.market, rather than bloomberg.com. Twitter did not immediately offer additional comment.

The website carrying the false report was registered on July 10, according to a domain search on the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers.

The domain was registered in Panama to WhoIsGuard, a company which puts its own information as a web site registrant to mask the identity of the actual owner.

The report came weeks after one of Twitter's earliest investors, Chris Sacca, said Twitter would be an "instant fit" for Google if it were to acquire the microblogging site.

Shortly after Sacca's comments, former Chief Executive Officer Dick Costolo abruptly stepped down amid increasing scrutiny of the company's slow user growth and inability to attract advertisers at the same rate as its competitors.

Twitter's stock was up 3.1 percent at $36.88 in early afternoon trading. Earlier, it rose as much as 7.6 percent to$38.63. Thirty-nine million shares traded in consolidated volume, exceeding the 50-day average of 19.9 million shares, according to Thomson Reuters data. The stock was the day’s most actively traded among New York Stock Exchange-listed shares.

On May 14, a hoax offer filed with the SEC to buy cosmetic company Avon Products sent its shares as much as 20 percent higher.

A Securities and Exchange Commission spokesperson declined to comment.- Reuters