Report: Twitter CEO Dick Costolo has breakfast with Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer

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Let’s just have a show of hands: Who doesn’t want to buy Twitter?

That might be simpler than tracking the ever-ballooning list of companies flirting with the popular microblogging service.

For a company that says it’s not for sale, Twitter sure seems to generate an outsized amount of interest.

Forbes’ Victoria Barret reports that Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer had breakfast this week in San Francisco with Twitter CEO Dick Costolo. Twitter has a deal with Microsoft’s search engine, Bing. But could this meeting portend something more?

Microsoft tried to buy Yahoo. It tried to buy Facebook. Why not make it a rejection trifecta and make an offer for the Internet’s ‘it’ company?

Microsoft and Twitter gave no comment to Forbes.

The report comes on the heels of the disclosure from Microsoft Senior Director of Corporate Strategy and Acquisitions Fritz Lanman at Le Web, the Internet conference in Paris, that Microsoft offered Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg $15 billion for the social networking service, and even promised to let Zuckerberg run it. Instead it had to settle for an investment. The story was not new, recycled from David Kirkpatrick’s most excellent book ‘The Facebook Effect.’

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-- Jessica Guynn