Stripe and Advent offer $53 billion to take PayPal private

PayPal's market cap peaked at about $360 billion in 2021. By Monday's close, it had fallen to roughly $36 billion, a 90% drawdown. On Tuesday, Stripe, the private payments company that has never traded on a public exchange, and private-equity firm Advent International offered about $53 billion to take PayPal private, according to two people familiar with the matter. The price: $60.50 per share, a 28% premium to the July 14 close.

The bid is not a hostile gesture. The two firms first approached PayPal in early April and have not yet heard back. They are now seeking to advance discussions in the coming weeks, the people said, but they cautioned there is no certainty the talks will produce a deal. PayPal, Stripe, and Advent all declined to comment. PayPal shares rose more than 15% in early trading on the news, a signal the market is treating the approach as serious even if the principals will not.

If it closes, the deal would create the largest merchant acquirer in dollar terms on the planet. Stripe processes roughly $1.9 trillion in annual total payment volume; PayPal processes nearly $1.8 trillion. Together that is about $3.7 trillion, roughly 3% of global GDP, on a single set of rails, with no public-market disclosure obligation. A merchant acquirer is the back-end processor that moves card money from a buyer's bank to a merchant's bank. Concentrating that much volume under a single private owner is a structural change to US digital-payments plumbing.

The mechanism of the bid is the mechanism of the story. The proposed structure is a 50/50 joint ownership between Stripe and Advent, with no breakup of PayPal. The financing includes about $50 billion in committed bank lines, suggesting the buyers are not betting on cost synergies or a quick resale. They are betting they can run PayPal as a private, longer-horizon franchise, with patience for sub-20% margins that a public-market owner could not supply. PayPal has retained Goldman Sachs and Evercore as financial advisors on the response.

That framing is the test case for new CEO Enrique Lores, who took over in March and immediately launched a broad turnaround plan that included an April reorganization into three divisions: checkout, consumer financial services including Venmo, and payments and crypto. Lores's pitch to the board is that PayPal's consumer brand and Venmo surface are worth more as a refocused standalone than as a $53 billion fire sale. The unsolicited bid is the market's reply.

It is also a vote of no confidence in the bear case for PayPal. The stock has lost more than 40% over the past 12 months, hammered by competition from Apple Pay and Google Pay on the consumer side and by Stripe's own encroachment on the merchant side. PayPal was founded in the late 1990s and spent two decades as the default consumer-payments brand in the US. That a private, $1.9 trillion-volume rival is now choosing to buy that brand, rather than build against it, is the part of the deal the wire copy skips past.

The next milestone is PayPal's response, expected in the coming weeks. Sources said the two sides have not yet engaged on price or structure, and the binding test after that is whether $50 billion in committed financing can survive a full diligence cycle and a competing-bidder check. If it does, the public market will lose its last pure-play US consumer-payments franchise, and a private rival will own the largest consumer surface it could not build on its own.