Slack shares soar following report of possible Salesforce acquisition

Slack shares soar following report of possible Salesforce acquisition

Shares of Slack rose as much as 32% Wednesday following a Wall Street Journal report that Salesforce held talks to buy the company.

Salesforce stock dropped around 4% on the news.

The deal would likely value Slack at more than its market cap of $17 billion, according to the report. However, Slack's market cap ballooned to more than $20 billion following the WSJ report.

Salesforce has been on an acquisition spree, taking advantage of its market cap growth in recent years to buy growing companies. It acquired MuleSoft for $6.5 billion in 2018, the company's biggest deal ever at the time, to help connect cloud applications. The following year it spent more than twice that amount on Tableau, acquiring the data visualization company for $15.3 billion.

Slack would be one of the biggest software deals ever for the industry. It would rank among IBM's $34 billion purchase of Red Hat in 2019, Microsoft's $27 billion purchase of LinkedIn in 2016 and Facebook's $19 billion purchase of WhatsApp in 2014.

"This would be a game changer move for Benioff & Co. to further build out its collaboration engine and product footprint as cloud spending ramps across the enterprise," Wedbush Securities' Dan Ives told CNBC, referring to