Stripe said to abandon $50B pursuit of PayPal

rekttrader

Diligence told them they’re buying a almost dead payment processor with ancient tech. Customer lists are worth something but not that much.

ChrisArchitect

6 months ago: Stripe reportedly makes offer to acquire PayPal https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47144064 1 month ago: Stripe and Advent have made a joint offer to acquire PayPal – sources https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48915953

allears

Stripe is tiny compared to Paypal, and the dodgy Stripe CEO was trying to do some wildly creative financing and work the social media memes in an effort to pull this transaction off. Wall St. basically thought it was stupid and wouldn't support it. Glad he finally gave up -- he certainly got his money's worth of free publicity out of it.

ocd

I've been wondering about this since it came up in my newsreader that they wanted to acquire PayPal. Seemed like odd timing to me given PayPal has been questionable but necessary in a lot of cases for online businesses in international payments. In Canada, we use Interac for more ordinary payments between ourselves, and the usual credit cards through card processors like Moneris or bank provided services in physical stores. I can imagine fewer uses for PayPal as time goes on, especially with the accelerated change driven by geopolitics. Visa and Mastercard may be at risk internationally for other countries seeking to keep payment processing entirely in their own yard. This matter in particular made me wonder how things will go for Stripe going forward with these policy changes that may impact credit cards. I'd love to delete my PayPal account and never log in again, but the use case for me right now is mostly that companies (outside Canada, and outside NA in most cases) usually only accept payment with PayPal.

aghuang

Thought this would happen and would work out. Must have been a disagreement on more than just the price. Only Stripe knows.

diogenescynic

PayPal is dying and not that slowly. It's being replaced by Stripe, Adyen, Checkout.com, Apple Pay, Google Pay... etc. margins continue to decrease with no real moat to rising competition. Eventually it will just be Venmo and Braintree left and PayPal will be a company like Western Union that people used to need, but now is mostly used by scammers... They completely squandered their spin off from eBay and acquired terrible companies along the way that didn't pan out really even one time. I wouldn't pay $25B for them. You're buying a depreciating asset.

tyre

Makes sense: > The takeover interest has helped it recover, with PayPal shares jumping more than 40% this quarter to give the company a market value of about $52.6 billion. Seems like they tried to buy a struggling company and leaks of the talks made it too expensive.

acd

There is us fair competition law Sherman anti trust act laws. "is a United States antitrust law which prescribes the rule of free competition among those engaged in commerce and consequently prohibits unfair monopolies" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherman_Antitrust_Act