NEW YORK — The company that once defined internet payments is now potentially a takeover target for the very competitor it helped inspire.
Stripe and private equity firm Advent International are in advanced negotiations to acquire PayPal Holdings in a transaction that would value the struggling digital payments giant at approximately $53 billion, The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday, citing people with knowledge of the matter. The two companies put forward a preliminary offer of $60.50 per share in July. PayPal’s board rejected it. Negotiations continued regardless.
The persistence of those talks signals that both sides see value worth arguing over. PayPal’s management is running a restructuring it has barely started and may not have enough runway to complete it independently. A deal could close “in the coming weeks,” according to people familiar with the discussions. PayPal declined to comment on the report. Stripe said the company does not comment on “rumors or speculation.”
PayPal’s market capitalization peaked above $340 billion in July 2021, when pandemic-era e-commerce created conditions the company would never see again. Within eighteen months, those conditions reversed. Physical retail recovered. Competition intensified. Apple Pay and Google Pay expanded to every iPhone and Android device. Stripe quietly captured the developer-facing enterprise market that PayPal had never moved quickly enough to own. Buy-now-pay-later competitors ate into the consumer lending business PayPal had spent years building. The company reorganized repeatedly, spent heavily, and watched its valuation decline by more than 80 percent from that peak.
The $53 billion Stripe and Advent are willing to start at represents the floor of what PayPal’s board will accept. It also reflects reality. PayPal’s shares trade where they trade. The pandemic premium is not coming back.
For Stripe, the private payments processor founded by Patrick and John Collison and valued at roughly $65 billion in its most recent internal assessment, acquiring PayPal would achieve in months what organic growth would take years to reach. PayPal has approximately 400 million active consumer accounts globally. Its checkout button appears on more retail sites than any competitor. Venmo controls a foothold in social and peer-to-peer payments that Stripe has never attempted to build from scratch.
The combination would also remove Stripe’s most recognizable rival from independent competition. That outcome carries strategic value even before any technology or customer synergies are counted. TechCrunch reported the negotiations in detail on Thursday, noting that the talks “have not stopped” despite the July rejection, an unusual persistence that implies both sides believe a price exists somewhere between where they started and where PayPal’s board wants to land.
The antitrust question is not simple. The Justice Department has moved aggressively against large technology and financial mergers in recent years. PayPal and Stripe occupy overlapping but distinct market segments. PayPal is strongest in consumer-facing checkout; Stripe dominates API-driven enterprise infrastructure. How a regulator defines the combined entity’s market position will determine whether the deal can close at all, or under what conditions.
Private equity’s presence in the consortium matters for the deal structure. At $53 billion, no single strategic buyer can easily finance the acquisition without significant leverage. Advent International, which manages more than $90 billion in assets and has a long record in financial services and technology carve-outs, provides the balance-sheet capacity Stripe cannot supply alone. Advent’s approach in deals of this type typically runs toward cost compression and portfolio rationalization, both of which align with what PayPal’s current chief executive has already announced.
Enrique Lores, who left the top role at HP to join PayPal as chief executive in March, is reorganizing the company around three operating units: a merchant checkout division, a consumer financial services arm built around Venmo, and a payments infrastructure unit that encompasses PayPal’s crypto ambitions. He also announced a workforce reduction of roughly 20 percent over two to three years. Under Advent’s ownership stake, if a deal closes, that timeline would likely compress.
Whether that restructuring is worth more executed under PayPal’s own ownership, or absorbed into a Stripe-led consolidation, is the calculation the board must now make. A sale at $60.50 or above locks in certainty for shareholders who have watched the stock fall for five years. Holding out for a higher price, or for the turnaround to deliver returns, carries the risk that the bid disappears before either can happen.
The published terms tell us where Stripe and Advent started, not where they intend to end. The gap between $60.50 per share and PayPal’s reservation price is where this negotiation will be decided. Regulatory clearance, financing structure, and the board’s actual threshold are all unresolved. The deal could close in weeks. It could collapse before either side publicly confirms a conversation has taken place.
What is already settled: the company that once commanded the highest market capitalization of any dedicated payments processor in history is in discussions to be sold at a fraction of that peak value. The summer of 2026, which has already produced SpaceX’s $60 billion Cursor acquisition and reshaped how investors think about technology sector consolidation, may yet add the end of PayPal’s independent run to its ledger.
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