Twitter sale: Disney and Microsoft join Google in list of potential bidders

Disney and Microsoft have reportedly joined the list of potential buyers for Twitter as the bidding war for the social media platform is heating up.

Rumours of a potential sale came on Friday as the company grapples with its slowest revenue growth since going public in 2013.

Bloomberg first reported on Monday that Disney is considering bidding on Twitter, joining a growing list of potential suitors said to include Salesforce, a US cloud computing company and Alphabet’s Google, among other tech companies.

Shares in Twitter jumped more than 20 per cent on Friday following the takeover reports.

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They climbed another 3 per cent on Monday, with Twitter's market value surpassing $20 billion (£15.5bn) for the first time this year, as Disney joined the bidding war.

Disney, the owner of channels such as ABC and ESPN, is trying to secure its future in the digital world.

Investing in Twitter could give the company a strong distribution platform for video content as well as a way to communicate directly with its customers, according to Bloomberg/

Jack Dorsey, the current chief executive officer of Twitter, is already on the board of Disney since 2013 and is close to Bob Iger, chief executive of the Walt Disney Company.

Iger has made himself a reputation of “strategic thinker” after making several bold acquisitions such as Pixar, Marvel and Lucasfilm.

But some analysts were sceptical of such a deal, citing strategic, economic and philosophical reasons.

Disney and Twitter did not respond to requests for comment.

Microsoft is also said to have joined this list of potential bidders, according to a separate report by the CNBC. Meanwhile, Facebook is reportedly unlikely to have interest in buying the struggling social network.

In its most recent quarterly earnings statement, Twitter's revenue missed Wall Street estimates and the revenue forecast for the current quarter of $590 million to $610 million was well below the average analyst estimate of $678.18 million.

The company has struggled to keep up in the face of fierce competition from rival social media platforms such as Snapchat and Instagram.