I’ll check the latest coverage on the StripeAdvent PayPal bid so the article is up-to-date. Stripe and private-equity firm Advent International have walked away from their circa$53bn bid for PayPal, which would have been the biggest deal ever in fintech and among the biggest ever leveraged buyouts. Bloomberg was the first to report on the move late on Thursday, quoting sources close to the situation; Axios and Reuters Then reported the same. The three firms all refused to comment. The consortium had bid $60.50 a share in July, about 28 percent above PayPal’s then-current price and a proposal that would have valued the payments innovator at more than $53 billion.
The bid was supported by roughly $50 billion of committed bank financing, with JPMorgan and Morgan Stanley as the lead banks and advisors, and would have made Stripe and Advent joint owners of PayPal on equal terms, instead of breaking the company up. A previous bid had been made in April with Block as a third partner, who later pulled out. Based on people briefed on the talks, Paypal’s board did not formally accept the offer and found it too low. Directors said the price did not recognise the value of the company’s turnaround since Enrique Lores’ appointment as chief executive earlier in 2026; the former HP executive had been appointed to head the company’s turnaround, and previously sat as chairman on the board. Directors also mentioned the regulatory risk in merging two of the internet’s largest merchant-payment platforms, which handled combined transactions worth around $3.
7 trillion a year, and questions on the resilience of such a large leveraged funding package. There have been reports of the two parties returning to the table to explore a higher number; those parties did not reach an agreement. The market had turned against the bid. Takeover talk, plus a better-than-anticipated quarter, pushed PayPal shares up more than 40 percent for the quarter, and the stock closed Thursday at $61.47, well above the $60.50 offer.
Hard to raise tens of billions of dollars of acquisition debt if the target is running up instead of drowsily down. The shares plunged 12 to 16 percent in early Friday trading after the announcement of the cancellation. As for Stripe, the privately held payments company worth around $159 billion, it would have brought PayPala consumer-facing brand with over 400 million accounts, with Venmo, the branded checkout, a Luxembourg banking license and a bigger role for wallets and cryptothe company would have been less dependent on Visa and Mastercard.
Advent, which owns a long-time payments partner in Worldpay, and owns Vantiv, Nexi, and Nuvei, would have created a payments behemoth with merchant infrastructure and consumer networks in one entity. Instead, Stripe announced last week that it was paying $8 billion for AI model marketplace OpenRouter; a source close to the company confirmed that negotiations for a PayPal deal and the acquisition were being carried out separately.
Conclusion
PayPal is currently traded at a lower discount rate than many of its payment competitor colleagues’ rates and much lower than the approximate $360 billion valuation that the company had at its peak in the pandemic boom period of 2021. This withdrawal of a large investor leaves the CEO with a big chance and a tough responsibility to confirm not only short-sighted early indicators but to demonstrate that they can transform into sustained growth in brand checkout, merchant services, new offerings etc as Apple Pay, Google Pay and Shop Pay are still taking market share away. It is said, per the people who know about the situation, that Advent and Stripe might still come back to the market; the $53 billion offer has been put on hold for the moment.