PHOTO: REUTERS
A report claiming that Twitter received an offer to be acquired for $31 billion, attributed to Bloomberg LP, is fake, Twitter and a spokesperson 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.
Twitter's stock was up 3.1% at $36.88 in early afternoon trading. Earlier, it rose as much as 7.6% 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.
A Securities and Exchange Commission spokesperson declined to comment.
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