Credit: PayPal
The Wall Street Journal reported the talks on 14 August. Cara Lombardo, Gina Heeb and Lauren Thomas wrote it. The framing is what changed. PayPal is in talks to sell itself, rather than fielding an offer it has rejected.
Stripe and Advent International proposed $60.50 a share in July, which PayPal considered insufficient. The two sides have been negotiating a higher price ever since. A deal could land in the coming weeks. PayPal declined to comment, and a Stripe spokesperson said the company does not comment on rumours or speculation.
Investors read it as progress. PayPal shares rose about 1.8% on the day the report landed.
The rejection was a position, not an answer
This desk reported the $60.50 offer on 15 July, at more than $53bn with roughly $50bn of committed bank financing. Two days later the board called it too low. Shares jumped about 19% to $56.60 on the news.
By the end of the month PayPal answered with a beat and a $70 target from Cantor Fitzgerald, and a chief executive saying he would consider anything offering superior value.
Read in sequence, those three moments look like a company defending itself. Read against Friday’s report, they look like a company setting a price.
What the combined company would be
The scale is the reason this matters beyond the fee. Stripe processes roughly $1.9trn a year on the merchant side of transactions.
PayPal and Venmo sit on the other side, with more than 440 million consumer accounts. Together the two would handle about $3.7trn a year. Stripe and Advent would hold equal stakes and become joint owners, Reuters reported earlier. Neither has plans to break PayPal up.
The strategic prize is not only volume. A merger could cut Stripe’s reliance on Visa and Mastercard, and let it fold Venmo, PayPal’s checkout and its crypto products into its own stack.
The analysis nobody has been reading
Mergermarket published a regulatory assessment of this deal on 5 August, by Troy Hooper and Serafina Smith. It is the most useful document in the saga so far.
George Paul, an antitrust partner at the law firm White & Case, gave it the line that frames everything. The deal “combines two sides of the digital payment player market”, he said. That is the structural objection in nine words. One company would own the infrastructure merchants use and the wallets consumers pay from.
The data question follows from it. An integrated platform would see merchant transactions and consumer spending and identity at the same time. One of the other voices in that assessment is worth noting for who he is. Aman Verjee is an antitrust scholar at Practical Venture Capital and a former PayPal executive.
Either the Federal Trade Commission or the Department of Justice would run the review. Which of them takes it is not yet clear.
What clearance would probably cost
The assessment does not expect a courtroom. It expects conditions. Divestitures are the likeliest, and the analysis names two candidates. Venmo or Braintree would be the pieces to sell.
Behavioural conditions are the alternative, with interoperability mandates the obvious form. Reviews could run across multiple jurisdictions and take years.
Set that beside Reuters reporting no plans to break PayPal up. The most probable route to approval is selling a piece of it.
Braintree is the quieter candidate and the more consequential one. It is PayPal’s merchant processing arm, which is precisely the business Stripe is in.
Why PayPal is at the table at all
The company is worth a fraction of what it was. It was trading near historic lows when the proposal arrived, and it has shed roughly $320bn from its pandemic peak.
Enrique Lores took over in March after years at HP. In April he reorganised the company into three units covering checkout, consumer financial services including Venmo, and payments and crypto.
He told investors in May that PayPal would recommit to fundamentals and become a technology company again. The cost side of that plan targets $1.5bn of run-rate savings and cuts about 20% of the workforce over two to three years.
The business itself is not collapsing, which is why the board pushed back. Second-quarter revenue reached $8.68bn, up 5%, with adjusted earnings of $1.38 a share and net income of $1.1bn.
PayPal was founded in 1998 by a group including Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Max Levchin and Luke Nosek. Almost every one of them left to build something larger.
Stripe has been buying aggressively
This is not an isolated move. Stripe entered talks in July to pay about $10bn for OpenRouter, roughly eight times the marketplace’s May valuation.
The pattern is a company buying position rather than revenue. An AI model marketplace and a consumer wallet have little in common except that both sit between a buyer and a seller.
John Collison has been explicit about where he thinks that leads. He argues agentic commerce will make search obsolete and force retailers to optimise for algorithms.
Owning both ends of a payment makes more sense in that world than in this one. It also makes the competition case harder, for the same reason.
The European question
Nothing in the published analysis addresses Europe directly. It names US agencies and says reviews could span multiple jurisdictions.
Both companies are licensed here regardless. Stripe operates through Stripe Technology Europe Limited, an Irish entity, and PayPal through a Luxembourg-licensed bank it has run since 2007.
Neither company has said anything about European filings. That silence is worth watching rather than reading into.
The scale makes a filing hard to avoid. A payments business handling $3.7trn a year does not clear European thresholds by staying quiet about them.
What would settle it
Three things, and the first is the number. PayPal turned down $60.50, and whatever it accepts sets the value of a rejection as a tactic.
The second is whether the announcement arrives with a remedy already attached. Buyers who expect a fight sometimes offer the divestiture on day one.
The third is Braintree. If it is quietly excluded from the deal, that tells you what the lawyers concluded before anyone filed a thing.
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