Late last night, the New York Timespublished a report saying that Michael Bloomberg would like to buy the Financial Times from Pearson.
In the report, the Times said that "factions" at Bloomberg LP hate the idea and "have argued that it would be smarter to buy a digital property, pointing to the Web site LinkedIn as an example."
That's a surprising piece of news.
LinkedIn's current market cap is almost $12 billion. Because it's a healthy and growing public company, it would likely cost Bloomberg much more than that to buy it.
It would be surprising if Bloomberg were able to afford to spend that much. Bloomberg is a private company and it does not disclose its financials, but we estimate its value is somewhere around $35 billion.