Rumors that Twitter is for sale or looking for funding are just rumors, according to co-founder Biz Stone. Google and Facebook have both been reported to be in talks to take over the company, and a recent Financial Times story had JP Morgan looking to buy 10% of Twitter stock, but Stone says that the company is too busy to think about such things right now. Talking at a business forum in Seoul, he said,
We have so many other things before we even think about that. We are not even discussing it internally. It’s too far off.
Stone added that, despite Twitter’s reported value, the company isn’t thinking about funding anytime soon in large part because it doesn’t need to:
We make money. We earn money from a suite of products — We have promoted tweets … promoted accounts, all of which are in our advertising mechanism. We are just really getting started. We have some internal forecasts (for advertising revenue for 2011) but nothing is really shared right now. We don’t need to set the world record or anything like that.
According to outside estimates, the company is expected to generate around $150 million this year from advertising. I guess an estimate of 140 would’ve been way too cute.
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