PayPal Takeover Talks With Stripe and Advent Still Alive, Weeks After $53 Billion Offer Rejected

PayPal's board said no in July. Nobody told the negotiators to stop talking.

According to the Wall Street Journal, Stripe and private equity firm Advent International offered $60.50 a share for PayPal last month, valuing the company at roughly $53 billion. PayPal rejected it as too low. Talks have continued behind the scenes, and a deal could come together within weeks.

PayPal declined to comment when TechCrunch asked about the report. A Stripe spokesperson told TechCrunch the company doesn't comment on rumors or speculation. PayPal has issued no public confirmation of any deal, according to Yahoo Finance and time.news.

Why PayPal Is Even Considering This

CEO Enrique Lores, who joined PayPal in March after spending years at HP, has been trying to fix a company that ballooned during the pandemic e-commerce boom and then stalled out, according to TechCrunch. In April he split the business into three units: checkout solutions and PayPal, consumer financial services including Venmo, and payment services and crypto. In May he told investors PayPal needed to recommit to fundamentals, including, in his words, "becoming a technology company again."

Part of that turnaround plan is brutal on headcount. PayPal expects to cut its workforce by 20% over the next two to three years, per TechCrunch's reporting. A sale of the whole company would be the most dramatic version of a turnaround imaginable, one where Lores essentially hands the keys to the private equity firm and the rival that spent a decade eating PayPal's lunch.

The Role Reversal

Stripe is the developer-focused payments company that Silicon Valley loves and that has steadily taken market share from PayPal for years. Under the proposed terms reported by both the Journal and Reuters, Stripe and Advent would take equal stakes in the combined company and would not break PayPal apart into pieces, according to Yahoo Finance's reporting on the Reuters account.

Stripe can afford it. The private company was formally valued at $159 billion as of February 2026, and secondary-market pricing on the Hiive platform put its implied value near $198.78 billion as of August 14, based on stockanalysis.com data cited by Yahoo Finance. A $53 billion-plus deal for PayPal is well within Stripe's balance sheet gravity, even before factoring in Advent's contribution.

What hasn't been disclosed is how the two buyers would actually split the financing for an all-cash offer of this size.

PayPal Wasn't the Only Rumor

Bloomberg has separately reported that at least one other large PayPal rival was looking at buying the whole company, while other potential suitors were circling specific pieces of the business rather than the entire operation, according to Yahoo Finance's summary of that reporting. That suggests the Stripe-Advent approach isn't happening in a vacuum. PayPal, despite its struggles, is apparently viewed across the industry as worth owning.

Jim Cramer captured the market mood on CNBC's Mad Money, in an episode referenced August 11: "They haven't agreed to anything, but it hasn't been shot down." He said the stock "roared because PayPal apparently got a takeover overture from the giant private fintech company called Stripe."

He wasn't exaggerating on the stock move. PayPal shares surged 32.5% in July alone, making it the third-best performer in the S&P 500 that month, largely on the takeover speculation, according to Yahoo Finance. On Friday, August 14, shares were up roughly another 1.7% on the news that talks were still alive.

What Still Has to Happen

Combining the two largest names in online payments would not sail through regulators. Both Yahoo Finance and time.news flag significant antitrust exposure in the United States and likely in Europe, given how much of the payments market Stripe and PayPal control between them.

There's also the simple matter of price. PayPal already said $60.50 wasn't enough once. Whether Stripe and Advent come back with a number the board will actually accept, and whether that number gets publicly disclosed before shareholders find out through another leak, is the open question hanging over the next few weeks.

No timeline has been confirmed by any party involved. If a deal hasn't been struck or shot down soon, Lores could eventually be forced to address the speculation directly.