Google, Apple, Disney out from Twitter acquisition race

San Francisco: Twitter stocks fell significantly after Google and Walt Disney reportedly ruled out to acquire the struggling micro-blogging platform - leaving only Salesforce in the bidding race.

According to a Re/Code report, Twitter`s shares dropped 17 percent in pre-market trading on Thursday after "deep-pocketed companies Google, Apple and Walt Disney" were reported to be out from the Twitter buyout race.

Twitter is expected to announce its next quarterly earnings on October 27.

According to earlier reports, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff is "building a case to Salesforce.com Inc. investors and others that his company should be the buyer."

The acquisition of Twitter - struggling to add new users amid stalled growth - may cost over $20 billion. It currently has 313 million monthly active users.

Salesforce is vying for a social networking platform in its kitty for long.

The company, "which reached $6 billion in annual revenue faster than any other enterprise software company", offers customer service software, market research tools, email marketing systems and other products and several of them already use social media.