Salesforce was a rival suitor for LinkedIn, says Benioff; sources say LinkedIn reached out to Microsoft
Context & Ripple Effects
The LinkedIn sale has a messier backstory than the clean $26.2B announcement suggested. Days after Microsoft unveiled the deal keeping Jeff Weiner as CEO under Satya Nadella, Benioff confirmed Salesforce was a rival suitor — and sources say it was actually LinkedIn that reached out to Microsoft first, not the other way around.
That fits a longer pattern between the two companies: a year earlier, Microsoft had floated a $55B offer to buy Salesforce itself, which died when Benioff held out for $70B. Subsequent reporting showed Salesforce's bid for LinkedIn likely topped Microsoft's at $200/share, and an SEC filing revealed interest from as many as five buyers, with Google and Facebook among them.
First-order effects
- Salesforce loses its shot at owning the professional graph and must keep competing against Microsoft's LinkedIn data inside sales and recruiting tools without a data asset of its own.
- LinkedIn's board now faces disclosure pressure: with multiple serious bids on record, shareholders can see the process was competitive even if the final price wasn't the highest offered.
Second-order effects
- Microsoft's all-cash structure beating a higher cash-and-stock bid sets a precedent for acquirers paying a premium for certainty — sellers facing regulatory risk will price that certainty into future deals.
- Google and Facebook's presence among the suitors signals enterprise data assets are now strategic targets for consumer platforms, forcing CRM rivals like Salesforce to weigh defensive acquisitions rather than organic product builds.
Third-order effects
- If failed courtships like Microsoft-Salesforce and Salesforce-LinkedIn keep ending in swapped roles — suitor becoming target, target courting a bigger buyer — large SaaS consolidation starts running through a small circle of the same handful of companies repeatedly bidding against each other.
- A pattern of boards shopping targets to multiple giants before signing points toward more activist and shareholder scrutiny of sale processes, making premium-versus-certainty tradeoffs a recurring governance fight.
The trend: Enterprise software consolidation is cycling through the same few mega-cap buyers — Microsoft, Salesforce, Google, Facebook — who alternately court and outbid each other for data-rich platforms.