Stripe, the payments infrastructure company founded by Irish brothers Patrick and John Collison, has acquired PayPal — the once-dominant digital payments giant that has lost 88% of its market value in under five years. Bloomberg first reported Stripe’s interest on Monday, and the deal was confirmed shortly after.
PayPal’s stock jumped nearly 7% on the initial report. The market treated this as good news for PayPal. It should have treated it as a eulogy.
From $356 Billion to $44 Billion: PayPal’s Stunning Collapse
The numbers tell a brutal story. PayPal peaked at a $356 billion market capitalization in July 2021. Today, it sits at roughly $44 billion — a collapse so severe that the company is now worth less than a third of Stripe’s latest $159 billion private valuation.
In the same period, Stripe went from processing a fraction of PayPal’s volume to surpassing it entirely. Businesses on Stripe generated $1.9 trillion in total payment volume in 2025 — up 34% year over year — eclipsing PayPal’s $1.79 trillion for the first time. A company most consumers have never heard of now moves more money than the most recognized digital payments brand on earth.
PayPal’s stock has plummeted more than 19% since the start of 2026 alone, after shedding nearly a third of its value in 2025. Earlier this month, the stock cratered on lackluster profit guidance, and the board brought in HP’s Enrique Lores to replace CEO Alex Chriss — the second leadership change in three years. Neither CEO could stop the bleeding.
Meanwhile, Stripe announced its $159 billion valuation the same day Bloomberg first reported the deal — a valuation up from $91.5 billion just a year ago, and from $50 billion in 2023. The company now serves over 5 million businesses and says its revenue suite beyond payments is on pace for a $1 billion annual run rate.
What Stripe Actually Wants: Infrastructure Eats Brand
The conventional reading of this story focused on M&A mechanics: can a private company swallow a $44 billion public one? What about antitrust? Which pieces of PayPal does Stripe want?
Those were fine questions. But they missed the structural shift this moment reveals. As payments analyst Linas Beliunas put it: “The real story is that payments have undergone a permanent structural inversion: infrastructure has won over brand.” PayPal’s 434 million consumer accounts, he argues, “hold more value as raw material for an infrastructure company than as a standalone entity.”
Stripe has been on an aggressive acquisition spree that makes the PayPal play look less like an opportunistic grab and more like the final move in a long game. In 2025 alone, the company acquired Privy — gaining control of over 110 million programmable wallets — and Metronome, which powers usage-based billing for OpenAI and Nvidia. Through its acquisition of Bridge, Stripe secured a U.S. national bank trust charter, effectively transforming itself into a challenger bank.
What does PayPal add? Access to a massive merchant acquiring portfolio and Braintree’s gateway, an established wallet and checkout system with global reach, and Venmo’s consumer network. There’s also PayPal’s PYUSD stablecoin, which would slot neatly into Stripe’s expanding crypto strategy — the company is already building Tempo, a Layer-1 blockchain targeting billions of transactions per second.
Payments consultant Richard Crone was more blunt: “Stripe is bottom feeding, hoping to buy PayPal at a deep discount, with the ultimate goal of using PayPal to secure a viable position in agentic commerce.”
The Internet Isn’t Buying It
The reaction across tech communities was a mix of alarm and dark humor. On Hacker News, the top comment captured widespread anxiety about market consolidation: “Stripe is a pain in the ass as a buyer… when you’re traveling abroad and can’t buy a service online with your card, you can be 95% sure that Stripe is the payment processor.”
Others pointed out the irony of Stripe absorbing a company universally despised by developers — only to potentially become it. “Sometimes you get the Boeing buying McDonnell Douglas,” one commenter warned, referencing the infamous merger where the acquired company’s culture consumed the acquirer.
The monopoly concerns are real. Stripe and PayPal together would control an overwhelming share of online payment processing globally. Users flagged entire industries — regulated cannabis, adult content, crowdfunding — where PayPal currently serves as the only viable alternative to Stripe’s restrictive policies. Merging them would leave these businesses with nowhere to go.
Others questioned Stripe’s own valuation. At $159 billion, Stripe trades at multiples far exceeding its public peers — Block fetches roughly 13 times operating income, PayPal just 7 times. “Stripe is overvalued by about 10x judging by Block and PayPal,” one analyst noted. “Best case scenario: Stripe gets larger, gets bloated, slower, eats some competitors, becomes its competitors.”
The Bidding War That Never Happened
Stripe wasn’t the only interested party. According to analysts at IDC and American Banker, Big Tech and AI companies — Google, Microsoft, Meta, OpenAI, and even Anthropic — had eyed PayPal’s payment credentials as a strategic asset for AI-powered commerce, combining transaction data with large language models for buyer intent scoring and autonomous purchasing. But Stripe moved first.
Stripe is already building for this future. Its agentic commerce protocol — designed for AI agents that shop and transact autonomously — has early adopters including Anthropologie, Urban Outfitters, Etsy, and Kate Spade. Owning PayPal’s consumer-facing brand and merchant network now gives Stripe both sides of the agentic commerce equation: the infrastructure AI agents use to pay, and the consumer trust layer that makes people comfortable letting them.
John Collison told CNBC that Stripe isn’t aiming for an IPO anytime soon, saying it would “sidetrack” product and business growth. Acquiring a $44 billion public company while remaining private is, as one IDC analyst noted, “a feat of financial engineering” — and perhaps the clearest signal yet that the age of the consumer payment brand is over.
The message is now written in ink: the company that built the pipes owns the faucet too. And PayPal — once the undisputed king of digital payments — is now a Stripe subsidiary.