A leading Twitter executive has mistakenly tweeted about plans to buy an unnamed company. It’s an embarrassing blunder, but it could have been worse.

Anthony Noto, the company’s chief financial officer, posted a tweet that read:

I still think we should buy them. He is on your schedule for Dec 15 or 16 — we will need to sell him. i have a plan.

Noto deleted the tweet shortly afterwards. That the tweet was neither a reply, nor did it include the username of the person it was aimed at, makes it clear Noto intended to send the text as a direct message but mistakenly made it public. That’s the same mistake that many people have made, most notably politician Anthony Weiner who posted a compromising self-portrait.

In a sense it’s encouraging not only that Noto has proven it’s not just ordinary users can make such a mistake, but that blunders aside he has shown Twitter staff are happy to use their own technology for communication.

In another sense, he may have been fortunate that the message didn’t identify the potential target. Given that Twitter is now a publicly traded company, it’s subject to tight rules on publicly releasing information about potential mergers and acquisitions, something Noto in particular will be well aware of.

For those wondering, there are plenty of suggestions as to who might be in Twitter’s sightlines. The most popular seem to be Shots, a photo-sharing app, and Secret, an anonymous social network.