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