PayPal’s rejection of a $53 billion take-private proposal from Stripe and Advent International has set a clear benchmark for the company: if the board was right, PayPal as a standalone business must create more value than the $60.50-a-share cash offer it turned down. With second-quarter earnings due on July 28, that argument now faces its first market test.
Reuters reported on July 15 that Stripe and Advent had offered $60.50 per share, valuing the deal at about $53 billion. The bid represented a 28% premium to PayPal’s closing price on the prior trading day. The buyers had lined up roughly $50 billion in bank financing, planned to split ownership equally after closing and, according to the report, had no plan to break up PayPal. PayPal’s board rejected the proposal within days and formally announced that decision on July 20. Goldman Sachs and Evercore advised PayPal on the transaction, and separate reporting said the board’s internal view of a fair price was closer to $70 per share.
By rejecting a bid of that size, the board effectively told shareholders that the current management strategy can deliver value above $53 billion. That confidence still has to be earned through operating results. PayPal’s stock had fallen to $47.37 a share for a reason, and that reason was years of underwhelming execution.
PayPal reached its high on July 23, 2021, when the stock hit $305.88 and the company’s market capitalization approached $360 billion. By the time the takeover interest surfaced, PayPal’s market value had dropped to about $44 billion, down nearly 90% from the peak. That decline came even as payment volumes across the broader sector continued to grow.
Why the buyers were willing to pay up
Stripe is not known for throwing out acquisition offers casually, and its own operating profile helps explain why it saw an opening.
In 2025, Stripe processed $1.9 trillion in total payment volume, up 34% year over year. In a February 2026 secondary share transaction for employees, Stripe was valued at $159 billion. The company also spent $1.1 billion to acquire stablecoin infrastructure firm Bridge and incubated Tempo, a payment blockchain project. Tempo has raised a combined $500 million from Thrive and Greenoaks at a post-money valuation of $5 billion.
Advent International brings a long history in payments and fintech investing. Since 2008, the firm has invested more than $7.8 billion across 18 payments and fintech companies, including Worldpay, Nets and Nexi. Its own sector work has pointed to examples such as Worldpay and Vantiv, where payments businesses grew into industry leaders after operating independently. That framing fits neatly with a take-private thesis for PayPal.
Across public reports, the asset list that appears to matter most is fairly consistent: PYUSD, which spans 70 markets; PayPal’s branded checkout network; Venmo; and what KBW analyst Sanjay Sakhrani described as PayPal’s unique user-data advantage in agentic commerce. The premium was not just a bet on the business as it stands today. It was also a bet that PayPal could become core infrastructure for the next phase of digital payments.
PayPal’s board saw the same assets and reached a different conclusion. Its position was that those assets could be monetized more fully inside the company than through a sale. The trouble is that the market has heard versions of that story before, and the past five years have made investors cautious.
Five years of resets have weakened investor trust
PayPal’s operating history in recent years has been marked less by a lack of assets than by repeated shifts in strategy and leadership.
In October 2021, reports surfaced that PayPal was considering an acquisition of Pinterest at roughly $70 per share in a deal worth about $39 billion. PayPal shares fell after the news broke. When the company later abandoned the idea, its stock rose more than 6% in premarket trading. The market reaction suggested investors saw that move as a strategic mistake rather than an expansion opportunity.
In February 2022, management abandoned a long-term target of 750 million active accounts just one year after setting it. PayPal also disclosed 4.5 million illegitimate accounts on the platform and lowered its full-year revenue outlook. The stock dropped 25% in a single day and hit a 52-week low. The company’s broader ambition to build a one-stop super app largely unraveled at the same time.
Then came activist pressure. In August 2022, Elliott Management disclosed a $2 billion stake in PayPal and pushed for a value-creation plan. Within a year, Elliott had exited the position entirely. The article treats that full withdrawal as another negative signal.
Alex Chriss became CEO in September 2023 and said his first innovation event would impress the industry. Investors initially bought into the promise, sending the stock up more than 10% over the following week. But the event delivered Fastlane guest checkout, consumer cashback and smart receipts, products the market did not see as transformational. Shares fell about 4% on the day of the presentation. On Feb. 3, 2026, after growth in branded checkout slowed to 1%, the board removed Chriss. Chairman David Dorman said, “The pace of change and execution efficiency did not meet the board’s expectations.”
Enrique Lores, a former HP executive, then took over as CEO. In less than three years, PayPal has had three permanent CEOs, with CFO Jamie Miller serving as interim operator in between.
The 2019 acquisition of Honey, which cost PayPal $4 billion, has also come back into focus. The company originally framed Honey as an engine for e-commerce growth and data mining. In December 2024, however, a wave of reports accused Honey of altering affiliate tracking codes and diverting commissions from content creators. In January 2026, plaintiffs in a class action filed an amended complaint. Whatever the eventual legal outcome, the acquisition has not delivered the revenue value once promised.
The larger pattern is the one the buyers appear to have identified clearly: PayPal has spent years introducing strategies, revising them, changing management and restarting the process. The company has not lacked quality assets. It has lacked a strategy that could be executed steadily for more than two years at a time.
The numbers show a business leaning on lower-margin growth
Recent operating data has done little to ease those concerns. In 2025, PayPal generated $33.2 billion in revenue, up 4% year over year, and processed $1.79 trillion in total payment volume.
The more important issue is where growth is coming from. Excluding foreign exchange effects, branded checkout, one of PayPal’s core higher-quality businesses, grew just 1% in the fourth quarter of 2025 and 2% in the first quarter of 2026. Unbranded processing through Braintree grew 11%, but that business serves large enterprises with stronger bargaining power and thinner margins.
Share data points to a more structural challenge. Bernstein estimates that PayPal’s share of the U.S. digital wallet market has fallen from 90% in 2017 and 50% in 2023 to about 40% now. Apple Pay is nearing 20%, while Shop Pay has been growing at roughly a 30% compound annual rate.
User growth has also slowed sharply. As of the end of March 2026, PayPal had 439 million active accounts, only 4 million more than in December 2022. Over that same period, global e-commerce added hundreds of millions of consumers, yet PayPal’s net account growth barely moved.
Management’s guidance for 2026 has been cautious. Transaction-related profit is expected to decline slightly, and adjusted net income is likely to edge down or, at best, come in roughly flat. Over the last 12 months, PayPal has spent $6 billion buying back stock, repurchasing about 100 million shares. Motley Fool argued that, at the current pace, PayPal could theoretically buy back all shares outstanding by 2032. The article’s interpretation is blunt: heavy buybacks often signal that management cannot find better-return investment opportunities. The market’s valuation reflects that skepticism, with the stock trading at only 8.5x forward earnings.
The board still has a case, but every asset comes with questions
There is a real bull case for PayPal, and that is part of why the offer carried a premium and why the board was willing to hold out for more.
Venmo generated $1.7 billion in revenue in 2025, up about 20%. It had 67 million monthly active users, and debit card payment volume grew 50%. In October 2025, PayPal partnered with OpenAI to integrate one-click PayPal wallet payments into ChatGPT, giving the company an early foothold in agentic payments. PYUSD’s market capitalization reached $4 billion in March 2026.
Those assets are not free of risk. PYUSD has dropped by one-third from its March peak to roughly $2.8 billion, while the buyers’ stablecoin infrastructure buildout has continued to expand. Venmo became culturally mainstream years ago, yet PayPal only gradually found a mature monetization path. The ChatGPT payments partnership does not offer exclusive protection either, since OpenAI works with most major payment providers.
On valuation, investor Michael Burry, who has a large position in PayPal, has said $60.50 is merely an opening number and that a fair valuation is closer to $100 per share. Cantor Fitzgerald, using a sum-of-the-parts framework, estimated fair value at around $70 per share, broadly in line with the board’s apparent target.
Even if those valuation views are defensible, they run into one unresolved question: why should a company that has stumbled repeatedly over the last five years and struggled to execute be the one that takes a roughly $47 stock to $100? High-quality assets that cannot be monetized consistently do not hold their full value forever. In practice, that value tends to shift toward the party that can execute. On that front, the article argues Stripe and Advent have looked stronger than PayPal in recent years.
Tonight’s earnings are the first real scorecard
PayPal is due to release second-quarter earnings tonight. According to the article, the earnings release is expected between 6 p.m. and 7 p.m. Beijing time on July 28, with the conference call starting at 8 p.m. The report amounts to the market’s first broad judgment of the board’s decision to reject the bid.
For Enrique Lores, who formally took the role in March and has been in charge for only five months, investors want more than a top-line beat. They want to see branded checkout reaccelerate, Venmo remain on a steady growth path, and PYUSD and agentic payments partnerships translated into a clear revenue plan. This is not a one-quarter burden. The article’s point is that PayPal would need to deliver quarter after quarter for years to prove that independent operation can create more value than a $53 billion takeout.
The first-quarter report already showed how deep the credibility problem runs. Revenue came in at $8.4 billion, up 7% year over year and above expectations, yet the stock still weakened because management’s outlook remained cautious. That has created a vicious cycle: even when results beat, investors discount them; even when management makes strategic promises, investors ignore them. The deadlock was broken only when a buyer stepped in with real money, which is exactly what Stripe and Advent did.
The buyers can still wait. The financing package is already prepared, and the industrial logic behind the bid does not fade quickly. If PayPal posts more weak quarters, shareholders may become more open to a sale.
Over the last five years, PayPal has shown that owning attractive assets and turning them into durable earnings are two very different capabilities. By rejecting the offer, the board has effectively wagered $53 billion of shareholder value on the belief that the company can finally close that gap. For now, the visible chips on the table are a CEO who has been in the job for about 20 weeks and a transformation plan that has not yet been fully laid out to shareholders. Starting on July 28, the market will test that conviction one quarter at a time.