NEW YORK — PayPal Holdings’ board looked at the $60.50-per-share offer Stripe and Advent International put on the table in July and decided the number was wrong.
The payment giant rejected the opening bid. The proposal, which valued PayPal at roughly $53 billion and carried approximately $50 billion in committed bank financing, was insufficient, and the consortium was sent back to negotiate, according to Engadget. Talks are continuing at a higher, undisclosed per-share price, and people familiar with the matter say a deal announcement could come within weeks, provided both sides can close the gap. The negotiations could still collapse.
PayPal, once valued at $320 billion at the height of pandemic-era e-commerce, has spent three years watching that valuation erode. By the time Stripe and Advent submitted their initial bid last month, the company’s market capitalization had settled near $40 billion, a decline of more than 87 percent from the peak. The board’s decision to push back on $60.50 per share, a roughly 50 percent premium to recent trading levels, signals that PayPal’s leadership believes the discount reflects a cyclical trough rather than a permanent loss of competitive standing.
Eastern Herald’s original coverage of the Stripe-Advent offer detailed the bid’s terms when they first emerged last month. The new development is the rejection and the fact that both sides remain at the table.
Stripe’s case for the acquisition is built on arithmetic that payments observers find difficult to dismiss. The two companies together would process approximately $3.7 trillion in annual payment volume, a combined scale that would let the merged entity negotiate directly with banks, reduce its dependence on card-network rails, and compete on transaction fees in ways neither can pursue independently. Visa and Mastercard sit at the center of nearly every consumer card transaction in the United States. A Stripe-PayPal combination would have the volume to build routing infrastructure that partially bypasses them.
That threat to card-network dominance has not gone unnoticed by competitors across the payments landscape. The race accelerated in 2026, with the launch of X Money in July adding another challenger to a market already crowded by Apple Pay, Google Pay, and Shopify’s Shop Pay. X Money’s 6 percent APY and metal Visa debit card represent Elon Musk’s most direct attempt yet to build a financial infrastructure layer around an existing consumer base, the same logic Stripe’s Patrick Collison is pursuing through a much larger acquisition.
The deal structure introduces its own complications. Stripe and Advent International, the Boston-based private equity firm managing more than $90 billion in assets, would each hold equal ownership stakes in PayPal. That co-ownership arrangement is unusual for a technology acquisition and reflects the complexity of the target: part growth-technology company, part mature financial infrastructure with deeply embedded merchant and consumer relationships. Advent’s participation signals an eventual exit, whether through a relisting, a secondary sale, or a breakup of PayPal’s component businesses, and the implied timeline pressure shapes how far the consortium is willing to stretch on price.
Enrique Lores, appointed PayPal’s chief executive in March 2026, has reorganized the company into three distinct operating units. The first covers the core online checkout product, where PayPal remains the dominant embedded option for small and midsize e-commerce merchants. The second is devoted to Venmo, the peer-to-peer app with more than 90 million active users in the United States but persistent difficulty converting that base into commercial revenue at competitive rates. The third handles cryptocurrency payments, a segment Lores framed as a future growth driver before any acquisition conversation reached its current stage.
Venmo is the most strategically interesting asset for Stripe. Collison’s company has dominated the developer-facing infrastructure layer; businesses building checkout flows choose Stripe. But it has no equivalent consumer product. Venmo’s installed base would give the combined company a retail layer Stripe has never had, and whether those 90 million users can be converted into meaningful commercial payment volume through integrated merchant tooling is a question neither side has answered publicly.
What neither has disclosed is the price PayPal’s board considers fair. The first offer of $60.50 per share was insufficient; the new discussions are happening at a higher figure, but no number has been made public. At $60.50, the bid implied roughly 1.5 times PayPal’s current market capitalization, a premium, but one the board apparently views as inadequate given its read on where the restructuring leaves the company’s long-term value.
The regulatory dimension remains unaddressed. A deal combining the two largest independent payment processors in the United States would receive scrutiny from the Department of Justice and potentially from competition authorities in the European Union, where payments infrastructure oversight has become more assertive. Whether regulators would view the combination as concentrating market power or as a legitimate competitive challenge to card-network dominance is a question a merger review would need to answer.
The gap between what Stripe and Advent are willing to pay and what PayPal believes it is worth is where most acquisitions stall. This one has not stalled yet.
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