PayPal shares surged as much as 19% on Wednesday after a joint bid from Stripe and private equity firm Advent International valued the payments pioneer at more than $53 billion. The offer could rank among the largest tech acquisitions in history.
The $60.50-per-share proposal represents a 28% premium to PayPal's Tuesday close and is backed by roughly $50 billion in committed financing from a group of banks, Reuters reported, citing two people familiar with the matter. Stripe and Advent would each hold an equal stake in PayPal under the deal, which was submitted earlier this month. PayPal has yet to respond.
PayPal closed Wednesday at $55.55, up 17.26%, on trading volume of 89.3 million shares, roughly 446% above its three-month average, per The Motley Fool. The stock remains 82% below its 2021 peak of roughly $360 billion in market cap, which collapsed to about $36 billion this year as rivals including Apple Pay, Klarna, and Google Pay chipped away at its dominance.
The deal's structure is highly unusual. Privately held Stripe, valued at $159 billion in a February tender offer per Crunchbase, has raised roughly $10.4 billion since its 2010 founding and completed 21 known acquisitions, 13 of them since 2020.
Its largest previous purchase was stablecoin infrastructure platform Bridge for $1.1 billion in 2025. A PayPal acquisition would dwarf all of them.
At $60.50 per share, Stripe and Advent are valuing PayPal at about 9 times the free cash flow analysts expect it to generate in 2026, according to Reuters Breakingviews. Stripe itself, by contrast, carries a valuation multiple of more than 50 times free cash flow.
If the buyers raise their offer to $70 per share (or $62 billion) and capture cost savings of roughly $900 million (10% of PayPal's operating expenses). They could earn a theoretical return of about 9.5%.
The crypto angle adds another dimension. PayPal launched its PYUSD stablecoin in 2023, which peaked at a $4.2 billion market cap in February before settling to about $2.85 billion.
Stripe acquired Bridge in 2024 and now processes stablecoin payments through Polygon's infrastructure at a 1.5% fee, well below the 3% to 5% typical of international transfers. A merged entity would combine Stripe's merchant reach with PayPal's hundreds of millions of users and stablecoin infrastructure, according to Blockonomi.
Polygon Labs' Global Head of Business, Aishwary Gupta, said a combined Stripe-PayPal "creates an engine capable of handling massive international transaction volumes" and predicted that "within the next few years, the majority of money will live and move on blockchain." The offer reportedly followed an initial approach made in April. The two parties are aiming to reach an agreement before the end of the month, per Yahoo Finance.
Prediction market Polymarket currently puts odds at 60% that Stripe will acquire all or part of PayPal.
Enrique Lores, who became PayPal's CEO in March, has launched a turnaround effort splitting the company into three units and targeting roughly $1.5 billion in cost savings over the coming years, work that now faces an uncertain future.
