Is Twitter, a company that lost money last year on a mere $45 million in revenue, really worth $10 billion?
That's the high-end of the valuation range being bandied about according to a report in The Wall Street Journal, which says that both Google and Facebook have engaged in "low-level talks" to acquire the micro-blogging startup.
In an indication of the fierce interest in Twitter from Wall Street to Silicon Valley, Marc Andreessen, the billionaire co-founder of Netscape, has invested $80 million in the startup.
Andreessen made his infusion, which was first reported by Kara Swisher at AllThingsD, in the private, secondary markets which are facilitating a brisk trade in shares for red-hot, non-public startups like Facebook, Twitter and Zynga.
In December, Twitter closed a $200 million funding round let by venture capital titan Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, which valued the company at $3.7 billion.
Silicon Valley and Wall Street are seeing a resurgence in internet company valuations, which are spurring something of a web IPO boom.
In the next two years, social networking juggernaut Facebook, gaming service Zynga, and shopping site Groupon could all go public. Web publisher Demand Media went public last month, and professional social network LinkedIn is set to go next.
Twitter could be not very far behind.
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