Stripe, a major payments processor, and Advent International, a private equity firm, have jointly offered to buy PayPal for $60.50 per share. That values the company at more than $53 billion, according to people familiar with the matter Reuters. The bid was announced on July 15, 2026, and confirmed by BeInCrypto and Seeking Alpha. The offer price is 28% higher than what PayPal's stock was trading for when the bid was made.

Two different buyers are joining forces here. Stripe brings payments technology and relationships with online merchants. Advent brings money and expertise in structuring large buyout deals. Think of it as a strategic buyer pairing with a financial buyer — one adds operational know-how, the other handles the financing. Reuters says this is a joint offer, not two separate bids. Specific details about how the deal would be financed, when it might close, or what regulators need to approve have not been disclosed.

This bid did not come out of nowhere. Reuters reported on February 23, 2026, that PayPal was attracting takeover interest after its stock price fell. The next day, Bloomberg reported that Stripe was considering a PayPal deal. Nearly five months passed before this joint offer was announced — a reasonable timeline for the research and funding work required for a $53 billion deal of this complexity.

How the deal gets paid for is the first thing serious investors will want to understand. Stripe is privately held, so it cannot use its own stock to buy PayPal the way a public company might. Advent's job is to arrange the borrowed money and investor capital needed. This matters because lenders will charge higher interest rates if they think the combined company might struggle to repay. PayPal carries debt from its lending businesses, which makes lenders more cautious.

The 28% premium — the extra amount being offered — sounds large but tells an incomplete story. PayPal's stock has been depressed for years compared to its 2021 peak. The premium is calculated against this lower price, not against what the stock used to be worth. When PayPal shareholders decide whether to accept $60.50 per share, they will probably compare it to where the stock might go on its own — including the value of its Braintree payment processor, its Venmo app, and its international business.

Regulators are likely to scrutinize this deal hard. Stripe and PayPal both operate in online checkout — the system that lets people pay when shopping online. Direct competitors trying to merge can face serious government opposition. Whether regulators view online checkout as its own separate market or lump it together with all payment options will determine how difficult the deal becomes. That debate alone could slow things down considerably.

Do not assume the deal will close at $60.50, or close at all. PayPal's board has not yet publicly responded. When companies receive unsolicited offers at this scale, they typically run a formal process — asking other buyers to bid, testing whether the company is better off staying independent, and negotiating both the price and the safety features (like financing guarantees and breakup fees). PayPal's advisors have had five months since Stripe's interest first surfaced to explore what else might be possible. That raises the question of whether $60.50 is a starting point or reflects talking that has already happened behind the scenes. That distinction matters more than the headline number in figuring out whether this becomes the biggest payments company buyout on record or just another chapter in the payments industry's post-pandemic reckoning.