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.
None of this makes sense or is supported by the facts. Stripe is reportedly valued at $159B, PayPal's market cap is currently $52.59B, and your claims about memes and Wall St are asserted without any citations or facts.
I agree with you in principle but I don't think that market cap is the right metric. Market cap captures a lot of assumptions around product mix and growth rates that have been in Stripe's favor for a long time.
The most apples-to-apples comparison is just looking at payments volume and ignoring all their other products. In that case, Stripe just recently overtook PayPal! PayPal is enormous! But Stripe has that compounding growth on its side and GP's argument has become outdated in a short amount of time.
This is ignoring the bit about pc which I just disagree with.
But that value is not tested or backed by the wider market.
Market cap of paypal is.
Also having just spaffed "$8bn" on openrouter, I would be surprised that they have enough resources to get the ~$50bn to buy paypal. Much less the work it would take to integrate a much larger company in to the "stripe" way
