Stripe, the privately held payments company founded by the Irish brothers Patrick and John Collison, is still in talks to buy PayPal, more than a month after its first offer was turned down.
Stripe and Advent International, the private equity firm, proposed $60.50 a share in July, valuing PayPal at roughly $53 billion.
The structure involved about $50 billion of committed bank financing alongside $17 billion of equity, with Stripe and Advent taking equal stakes in the combined business.
PayPal's board rejected the price as insufficient.
Negotiations never stopped, and reporting in mid-August indicated a revised deal could come together within weeks.
No price has been confirmed since, and no term sheet has been reported.
A reversal of roles
The striking feature of this situation is who is bidding for whom.
Stripe spent a decade positioning itself as the developer-friendly challenger to PayPal, taking share in exactly the merchant checkout business PayPal once dominated.
It carried a formal valuation of $159 billion in February, with secondary market pricing implying closer to $199 billion this month.
PayPal, by contrast, peaked at around $360 billion in 2021 and now trades at a market value near $53 billion.
The bid represents roughly an 85% discount to that peak.
Enrique Lores, who became chief executive in March after the board removed Alex Chriss, has restructured the company into three units covering checkout, Venmo and payments and crypto.
He has said the board remains open and objective, and will weigh any offer against its own turnaround plan.
That is a deliberately non-committal position, and it leaves the door open.
What the odds are saying
Prediction market pricing is the most useful read on where this is heading.
Polymarket's contract on Stripe acquiring PayPal in 2026 jumped from about 18% to 38% when the renewed talks were reported.
A parallel market on Stripe acquiring any part of PayPal sits near 66%.
Traders therefore think a partial carve-out is considerably more likely than a full takeover, with Braintree, the merchant services arm, and Venmo the assets most often named.
That reading has logic behind it, because a full combination of two of the largest payment processors would attract immediate antitrust attention on both sides of the Atlantic.
Why it matters here
PayPal remains one of the most widely held names in US technology funds sold to British investors, and it sits in most global index trackers.
A deal at anything near the levels being discussed would crystallise a heavy loss for anyone who bought during the pandemic boom.
For UK merchants, the practical question is whether checkout, Venmo and Braintree end up under one roof or scattered across buyers.
The board has already held out once for a better number.
Whether it can do so twice depends on how much Stripe wants the consumer network it once set out to displace.
