There's an old saying on Wall Street: "When the vultures start circling, somebody down there already stopped moving."
PayPal isn't dead. But damn, it's bleeding badly. And the vultures — sorry, the "strategic acquirers" — have already caught the scent.
The cold, hard facts
Bloomberg dropped the news on Tuesday that Stripe, that fintech everyone swore would IPO "next year" every year since 2021, is in early talks to buy PayPal. All of it or in pieces. Like walking into a butcher shop and saying: "Give me the filet, and if the price is right, I'll take the whole cow."
PayPal shares jumped nearly 7% on the day. You know what that is? That's the market saying: "Finally, someone's going to do something with this walking corpse."
And check out the beautiful context: PayPal has already lost more than 19% in 2026 alone and nearly a third of its value in 2025. The company swapped CEOs at the beginning of the month — brought in Enrique Lores, who comes from HP, because apparently the solution for a digital payments company in crisis is to bring in the guy who sold printers. Brilliant.
Stripe: from disruptor to predator
While PayPal withered, Stripe went in the exact opposite direction.
On that same Tuesday the rumor dropped, the company hit a $159 billion valuation after a secondary sale of shares to employees and investors. To put it in perspective: a year ago, it was worth $91.5 billion. Nearly doubled.
And this isn't just inflated startup valuation backed by a pretty PowerPoint. Stripe said its revenue suite — the part of the business that goes beyond payment processing — is on track to hit a $1 billion run rate by year's end. In January, they acquired billing startup Metronome. And now, apparently, they want the bigger prize.
John Collison, Stripe's co-founder, told Andrew Ross Sorkin that an IPO is not in the plans. That going public now would "distract from product growth."
Translation in plain English: "Why do an IPO when we can use our cash and our leverage to just buy the competition?"
It's the Thanos mindset. Why conquer the universe planet by planet when you can collect all the infinity stones at once?
What this actually means
Let's go beyond the headline, because this is where the financial media circus leaves you hanging.
PayPal was once the crown jewel of digital payments. Remember when it was synonymous with "paying online"? Yeah. That was before Stripe, Square (Block), Apple Pay, Google Pay, and all the real-time payment systems that killed the dinosaurs (every country's got its own version now). Competition ate PayPal alive.
So what would Stripe actually be buying?
- A massive user base (over 400 million accounts)
- A globally recognized brand (even if tarnished)
- Venmo — which on its own is a significant business in the U.S. market
- Checkout infrastructure already integrated into millions of websites
The risk? Buying a company in structural decline is different from buying a cheap company. Warren Buffett taught us this long ago: "It's far better to buy a wonderful company at a fair price than a fair company at a wonderful price." The $159 billion question is: which one is PayPal?
And there's an elephant in the room: how exactly does a private company worth $159 billion acquire a public company that, even after the selloff, still has a hefty market cap? Share issuance? Debt? Reverse merger? The talks are "early stage," which in M&A vocabulary can mean anything between "they exchanged half a dozen emails" and "there's already a term sheet on the table."
The signal nobody wants to see
When startups start swallowing incumbents, the cycle has shifted. It's no longer David vs. Goliath. It's David who became Goliath and now wants to buy the armor off the guy he knocked down.
If Stripe actually takes PayPal, it'll be one of the most symbolic moves in fintech history. The disruptor buying the disrupted.
Now tell me: are you still holding PayPal in your portfolio waiting for a miracle, or have you figured out that when the buyer comes knocking, it's because the owner already lost the game?
