On Friday, PayPal’s shares closed at $61.67. The takeover bid that a consortium put on the table in July was $60.50 a share. The market, in other words, has already decided the deal is coming.
The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday that PayPal has restarted discussions with Stripe and the private-equity firm Advent International about a sale. The two suitors offered $60.50 a share in July, a price that valued the payments giant at roughly $53 billion. PayPal turned the offer down, but the talks never fully closed, and people familiar with the matter say a transaction could be finalized within weeks.
The revival lands in the middle of a turnaround that PayPal’s new chief executive, Enrique Lores, is running at full speed. Lores arrived in March from HP, where he spent years steering a hardware company through a market that had stopped growing. In April he reorganized PayPal into three business lines and told staff that 20 percent of the workforce would be cut over the next two to three years. The plan, as he described it to employees, is to make PayPal leaner before it is sold, merged, or taken public again on stronger terms.
The stock market has been pricing the possibility for months. PayPal shares climbed through the summer as reports of the Stripe and Advent interest circulated, and Friday’s close above the offer price suggests investors expect the final number to come in higher. People close to the discussions say the two sides are haggling over price and deal structure, not over whether a transaction makes sense.
The logic of a Stripe-PayPal combination is easy to state and hard to execute. Stripe has built its business on developer tools and back-end payments infrastructure, while PayPal still owns one of the most recognized checkout brands in consumer e-commerce. Together they would control a large share of the pipes that move money across the internet, which is precisely why regulators will look hard at the combination. Antitrust lawyers who have reviewed the proposed structure say the review would hinge on how the agencies define the market for online payments, a definition that has shifted with the rise of Apple Pay, Klarna, and bank-backed instant transfer networks.
Advent’s role points to an alternative ending. Private-equity buyers typically take companies private, restructure them away from quarterly earnings pressure, and sell them later at a profit. A deal that puts Advent alongside Stripe could be structured as a take-private with Stripe as the strategic partner, a shape that lets both sides claim what they want: Stripe gains scale and distribution, Advent gains a turnaround story with a clear path to re-listing.
The company’s recent history explains why a sale is on the table at all. PayPal was spun out of eBay in 2015 and rode the pandemic’s e-commerce boom to a peak valuation of more than $300 billion in 2021. The subsequent slide was brutal: growth slowed, rivals grabbed share in peer-to-peer payments, and activist investors began agitating for change. Lores’s predecessor was pushed out after a short tenure, and the board concluded that a combination of cost cuts and a strategic buyer offered the best way to unlock value.
Analysts who cover the stock see the deal as a test of how much the market values payments infrastructure in a period of intense competition. Stripe’s own valuation has swung wildly in private markets, from a 2021 peak near $95 billion to lower marks in 2024 and a recovery since. A PayPal purchase at $53 billion or more would make Stripe a far larger company overnight, and it would also saddle the combined entity with PayPal’s regulatory exposure in dozens of countries.
There are reasons for caution beyond antitrust. PayPal’s branded checkout business still depends on relationships with merchants who have their own ambitions in payments, and a sale to Stripe could push some of them toward alternatives. Integration risk is real: the two companies run different platforms, different risk systems, and different cultures, and past payments mergers have a record of customer churn. Employees facing a 20 percent reduction over the next few years are not waiting passively; several departures of senior product executives have already been reported.
For Lores, the next few weeks decide the shape of his tenure. He was hired to fix PayPal, not necessarily to sell it, but a deal at a premium would hand his investors a quick win and hand him a role in the combined company or a clean exit. People familiar with the board’s thinking say directors are open to either outcome, and that the decision will turn on the price, the regulatory risk, and the terms that protect PayPal’s business during what could be a long review.
The bid, the stock price, and the calendar are now aligned. PayPal reports earnings next month, and a deal announced before then would spare the company another quarter of questions about its future. What the market already believes is simple: the offer is the floor, the talks are real, and the resolution is a matter of weeks, not months. Whether the final price matches the market’s optimism is the one question left open.
