Stripe and Advent Walk Away From $53 Billion PayPal Takeover Bid

The biggest fintech buyout attempt in history just collapsed. Stripe and private equity firm Advent International have walked away from their pursuit of PayPal Holdings, according to people familiar with the matter cited by Bloomberg News. PayPal, Stripe and Advent all declined to comment.

The consortium had offered $60.50 per share in July, valuing PayPal at more than $53 billion, according to Reuters reporting cited by Channel NewsAsia. That was roughly a 28% premium over PayPal's trading price at the time. JPMorgan and Morgan Stanley had lined up about $50 billion in bank financing to back the deal, according to Crypto Briefing.

PayPal's board said no. Reuters reported the board viewed the price as inadequate and flagged regulatory and financing hurdles, according to Channel NewsAsia. Airwallex, citing later reporting, said the board wanted closer to $70 a share before it would even consider a sale.

That wasn't the end of it. The Wall Street Journal reported in August that talks continued, with the two sides discussing a higher offer, according to both The Business Times and The Straits Times. Airwallex's mid-August summary described a deal as "possibly weeks away." It never happened. The consortium ultimately declined to sweeten the bid and pulled out entirely.

Why the math stopped working

PayPal's stock kept climbing past the offer price. Axios reported PayPal shares closed at $61.47 on the Thursday the withdrawal broke, above the $60.50 per share Stripe and Advent had on the table. BigGo Finance made the same point. Why would a board sell below where the open market already had the stock trading?

PayPal shares have jumped more than 40% this quarter, according to Bloomberg's reporting carried by both The Business Times and The Straits Times, putting the company's market value around $52.6 billion. Part of that run came from the takeover speculation itself. Part of it came from second-quarter earnings that beat analyst estimates.

The buyout rumor helped pump PayPal's stock high enough that the actual buyout offer no longer looked attractive by comparison.

The turnaround story behind the numbers

PayPal ousted CEO Alex Chriss earlier in 2026 and replaced him with Enrique Lores, who took over in March, according to Channel NewsAsia and The Straits Times. Lores was previously PayPal's independent board chair, according to Airwallex.

Lores has been running a restructuring push. In April, PayPal split its operations into three units: checkout, Venmo and consumer financial services, and payments and crypto, according to Channel NewsAsia. Lores has said he'll set specific financial goals for each business line and change how PayPal reports earnings, giving investors clearer targets to judge performance against, according to Bloomberg's reporting.

PayPal has also committed to cutting at least $1.5 billion in costs over two to three years, according to Crypto Briefing. The company had issued profit warnings earlier in 2026.

Whether that turnaround justifies a valuation above $70 a share, as the board reportedly wanted, remains an open question. PayPal remains a fraction of the roughly $360 billion valuation it commanded as a pandemic-era darling in 2021, according to Channel NewsAsia.

Stripe's next move

Stripe, still privately held, processed roughly $1.9 trillion in payment volume in 2025, according to Crypto Briefing. It's been viewed as the most likely consolidator in payments for years.

Block, the company formerly known as Square, was part of early PayPal talks alongside Stripe and Advent starting in April but exited before the formal offer went in, according to Channel NewsAsia.

Stripe didn't walk away from dealmaking altogether. Days before dropping the PayPal pursuit, Stripe agreed to pay $8 billion for OpenRouter, an AI model marketplace, according to Axios and BigGo Finance. A source told BigGo Finance the OpenRouter and PayPal deals were run on separate tracks with different teams, so one didn't cause the other to collapse. The contrast is striking: Stripe chose to spend $8 billion on AI infrastructure in the same window it walked from a $53 billion bet on legacy payments consolidation.

Neither Bloomberg nor Axios detailed the specific internal reasoning for the final withdrawal, beyond the fact that PayPal's board rejected the price and later talks failed to produce an improved offer everyone could live with.

Advent and Stripe could return with a new bid if PayPal's stock drops or its turnaround stalls. For now, PayPal trades independently on the Nasdaq under ticker PYPL, and Lores' cost-cutting and restructuring plan is the only turnaround story on the table.