Stripe said to abandon $50B pursuit of PayPal

11986 about 3 hours ago 19 commentsRead Article on bloomberg.com

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Discussion (19 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

rekttrader•about 2 hours ago

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

inigyou•12 minutes ago

PayPal is still the default processor in so many places. That's got to be worth something. Every other time I buy something online, PayPal is the default option.

sho_hn•about 1 hour ago

Curious to hear from someone who watches this space. What makes them dead?

It's still the only consistently supported thing I encounter online.

I'm aware things like Wero are poised to shake things up, but still have no real idea about timeline and impact.

nostrebored•31 minutes ago

Maybe we’re doing different things or in different regions, but I rarely see pay with PayPal now.

qingcharles•13 minutes ago

I see it absolutely everywhere still. We all exist in our own bubbles.

anonzzzies•24 minutes ago

Luckily I haven't for years now. But might indeed be different regions.

OrangeDelonge•15 minutes ago

Are you in Germany by chance?

LoganDark•26 minutes ago

The other consistently supported thing is card numbers. I generate virtual card numbers for every merchant, no need for some suspicious interloper. For non-recurring or one-off transactions -- new virtual card for each purchase.

enos_feedler•about 2 hours ago

Elon bought a dead social network and look at him go! But seriously, I log into paypal once a month to pay my landlord. I am a MAU. That is crazy. It’s more then I can say for ABNB. Maybe they should buy Paypal. Save on those transaction fees.

SllX•about 1 hour ago

I wish Twitter had been dead when Elon bought it, but no, Twitter was far from dead. X actually has fewer MAU as far as I can tell[1], and I wouldn’t call it dead either.

[1]: Seriously though, I can’t find good data I trust on this so correct me if you’ve got a good source saying otherwise, or even if someone has something substantiating this better I would take that too.

darth_avocado•about 1 hour ago

The social network is more dead than when he bought it. Wouldn’t need the an acquisition first by an ai company and then a space company to hide its worth.

LoganDark•26 minutes ago

I honestly wish they could've succeeded because PayPal is one of the banes of my existence. They're one of those faceless corporations that accuse everyone of money laundering in order to steal their shit.

anonzzzies•20 minutes ago

They held and stole quite a bit of money from my company when it was small 'for fraud'; it was a very hard time, and of course there was no fraud. It was a long time ago and I don't get angry anymore, but it was a nightmare and nothing you can do. Since then I moved to local processing, issuing, acquiring; I can thank Paypal for all of that. Hope they die a miserable death, but I guess 50B$ says at least the managers will drive their lambo's/yachts around no matter what happens unfortunately.

inigyou•11 minutes ago

Of course you can do something. You can sue PayPal.

ocd•about 1 hour ago

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.

ChrisArchitect•about 2 hours ago

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•about 1 hour ago

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.

jey•about 1 hour ago

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.

jmtulloss•12 minutes ago

[disclaimer: I used to work at stripe]

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.