Twitter has no plan to go public in the near future and does not need additional funds because it is making money, the co-founder of the popular microblogging website said today.
Biz Stone also dismissed reports JPMorgan Chase & Co was in talks to buy 10 per cent of Twitter for $450 million, which would have valued the company at $4.5 billion.
"We have so many other things before we even think about that," Mr Stone said when asked about the prospects of an IPO as fans crushed around trying to take his photo at a business forum in Seoul.
"We are not even discussing it internally. It's too far off," the 36-year-old said, adding that Twitter had no plans to raise funds over the next 12 months. The company, created in 2006, employs about 350 people.
Valuations for social networking companies have soared, with Facebook's recent $1.5 billion round of financing led by Goldman Sachs giving the firm a projected value of $50 billion.
Asked about a Financial Times report last week that said a technology fund from JPMorgan was in talks to buy 10 per cent of Twitter, Mr Stone said: "[The report is] made up."
Twitter, which allows users to send short, 140-character text messages, or Tweets, to groups of followers, is one of the Web's most popular social networking services. It had 175 million users as of September.
Last month, Netscape co-founder Marc Andreessen's venture capital outfit invested $80 million in Twitter.
In December, Twitter said it raised $200 million a deal that valued the company at $3.7 billion, less than a year after it began its first serious efforts to make money.
Mr Stone, who reportedly pronounced his given name Christopher as "Bizober" when he was learning to talk and decided to abbreviate it later to Biz, created Twitter with Evan Williams and Jack Dorsey in 2006.
He left Google at around the same time with Williams to start a new podcasting project and later worked to improve the then-popular text message to create Twitter. It has since become a popular communication tool for celebrities, politicians and businesses, and played a role in several geopolitical events including the recent uprising in Egypt.
Mr Stone said Twitter wanted to remain independent and was not in any formal bid talks. Twitter held talks with Facebook "a couple of years ago ... (but) nothing formal since and it's mostly rumours all the time", he said.
The Wall Street Journal reported last month that Google and Facebook have held low-level takeover talks with Twitter that give it a value as high as $10 billion.
"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," Mr Stone said. "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."
Reuters
