Analysis
Stripe and Advent are no longer pursuing PayPal, Bloomberg reported, abandoning a deal that would have ranked among the largest leveraged buyouts in history. Pulse covered the talks heating up back in mid-August; what's changed since then is that PayPal's own stock did the consortium's job for it -- running far enough ahead of the offer price that the numbers no longer clear.
The shape of the failed deal: in July, with PayPal trading near a historic low around a $40 billion valuation, the Stripe-Advent group offered $60.50 a share, implying roughly $53 billion and a 28% premium to where the stock sat. PayPal's board rejected it, arguing the company was worth more than that on its own. The board's bet paid off. A stronger-than-expected quarter combined with persistent takeover chatter drove PayPal's stock up roughly 40% since, pricing the original offer well below where the market now sits -- and making a debt-heavy leveraged buyout, which depends on locking in a spread between purchase price and cash flow, much harder to finance on the old terms.
“Stripe's own valuation sat near $159 billion in a February tender offer, roughly four times what it was offering for PayPal.”
Both companies remain live players in the same fight. PayPal, led by CEO Alex Chriss since 2023, has spent two years trying to modernize a checkout-era business against Block's Square and Cash App, Adyen's enterprise rails, and a wave of stablecoin and agentic-payment startups eating at the edges. Pulse's PayPal hub has the fuller history. Stripe, meanwhile, is running the opposite playbook -- buying rather than being bought, most recently closing its own $7.5 billion acquisition of OpenRouter earlier this month, a deal Pulse tracked as it firmed up. Stripe's own valuation sat near $159 billion in a February tender offer, roughly four times what it was offering for PayPal.
The risk in reading this as a clean resolution is that abandoned doesn't mean dead: Stripe and Advent could return with a higher bid, and PayPal's board has previously signaled it would consider a well-priced offer rather than reject acquisition outright. What's actually notable is less the specific collapse and more what it says about deal math in 2026 -- takeover speculation itself is now enough to move a target's stock beyond what an LBO can absorb, which raises the bar for every future approach in fintech.
PayPal reports its next quarter in November; how the stock holds without active takeover chatter propping it up will say more about whether this was a real re-rating or a speculation premium that fades.
