While most investors were eager to see CEO Dick Costolo step aside, we think he deserves much credit for scaling the business from $3B in value to over $25B over his six-year tenure, a feat few others in consumer internet can match. Further, the CEO dislocation coupled with no super-voting share structure, a board somewhat on the defensive, lots of potential asset value, and the current environment of cheap money--leads us to think [merger and acquisition] from a strategic [perspective] just became slightly more possible.

• All eyes turn to Apple, which has the money. But it might not crack open its $178 billion hoard to fork over $33 billion for Twitter, its current valuation. True in 2013, it acquired social media analytics company Topsy Labs for $200 million. But social media does not appear to be a strong strategy for the consumer electronics maker.
• More theories swirl around Google, with which Twitter recently inked a deal to rank tweets in Google searches. A mashup with Google Plus could bolster its own flagging social media endeavors.

• And then there’s Facebook. The company has $11 billion in cash on hand, and it’s shown an appetite for expensive purchases, such as its 2014 acquisition of mobile messaging application WhatsApp for $19 billion. And the two have reportedly been in talks before, which broke down over price, the first time in 2008 when Twitter had a valuation of a mere $500 million. More recently, price appears to have been a sticking point as well.
• Don’t count out Microsoft either. The software company has shown more interest recently in hardware companies like Nokia, for which it paid $7.2 billion in 2014. But its 2012 acquisition of Yammer, known as the “Facebook for business,” for $1.2 billion shows it has some interest in social networking.