PayPal is negotiating its sale to a group led by Stripe and private equity firm Advent International at a higher price than the buyers offered in July, the Wall Street Journal reported on August 14, 2026. PayPal’s board rejected that first offer, $60.50 a share, which valued the company at around $53 billion, as insufficient. The talks did not end there. They now turn on a single question: price.
The board wants closer to $70 a share
Stripe and Advent’s joint offer first surfaced in several financial outlets on July 15, 2026, at $60.50 a share, valuing PayPal at more than $53 billion. The August 14 report adds two things. It confirms how the board responded: it found the offer insufficient. And it shows that the rejection moved the talks rather than ending them. According to reports published in July, the board is looking for a price closer to $70 a share.
The gap between $60.50 and $70 a share is nearly 16%. Applied to a market value of about $53 billion, that is roughly $8 billion in additional value the buyers would have to finance, based on the two published prices and an unchanged share count. That is the distance that has separated the two sides for a month. The dispute is less about what PayPal is worth today than about how large a premium the buyers will pay for a turnaround whose risk they would be taking on.
Lores’s turnaround plan strengthens the board’s hand
Enrique Lores, the former chief executive of HP, has run PayPal since March 1, 2026. He had chaired PayPal’s board since July 2024. His plan calls for cutting about 20% of the workforce over two to three years, from a base of roughly 23,800 employees at the end of 2025, and for at least $1.5 billion in savings over the same period. In late April 2026, the company announced a reorganization into three operating units.
- Checkout Solutions & PayPal, which combines online checkout with the flagship PayPal brand.
- Consumer Financial Services & Venmo, the consumer business, built around the Venmo wallet.
- Payment Services & Crypto, which houses the processing infrastructure and digital assets.
The overhaul changes the negotiation. A quantified cost plan and a three-unit structure give the board a valuation argument, because they show a buyer exactly what it would get and when costs would fall. They would also make a partial divestiture easier if antitrust authorities demanded one.
Antitrust review and financing come next
Agreeing on price would solve only part of the problem. A tie-up between a leading payments technology company and the biggest consumer wallet would face review by competition authorities in the US, the EU, and the UK. The financing is also very large. Reports in July put the bank debt already committed at about $50 billion, on terms that depend on market conditions when the deal is signed.
For now, nothing is signed. The public record comes down to three facts: an offer, a rejection over price, and continuing negotiations. Still, it shows that PayPal’s board has accepted the idea of a sale and is now arguing only about the price. For a company that until recently was pursuing its turnaround on its own, that is a major shift.