The most common misreading of this week’s news is that Stripe’s $53 billion bid for PayPal is the warm-up act for a Stripe IPO — the muscle-flex before the listing. The opposite is closer to the truth: the bid is the strongest evidence yet that Stripe intends to stay private, because the deal only works from inside the private markets. Stripe is offering $60.50 a share for PayPal — roughly 9.5 times earnings — while its own investors paid up to a $159 billion valuation in February’s tender offer against $1.9 trillion in payment volume (CNBC, February 24, 2026). Buying public-market earnings cheaply while selling private-market growth dearly is a valuation arbitrage that dies the day Stripe rings the bell. That asymmetry, not the IPO clock, is the lens for everything that follows.
Having tracked Stripe’s valuation round-trip since the $95 billion peak of 2021 — down to $50 billion in 2023, back to $140 billion late last year and $159 billion by February — the pattern is consistent: every time the market decides an IPO is imminent, Stripe instead engineers private liquidity and goes shopping. The PayPal bid is that pattern at maximum scale. If it closes, Stripe absorbs 439 million active accounts and a $50 billion debt package — an integration that pushes any credible listing window to 2028 or later. If it fails, the fallback is not a chastened march to Nasdaq; it is another tender offer funded by Thrive Capital, Coatue and Andreessen Horowitz, the same firms that financed February’s round. Either way, the people searching for a Stripe stock ticker this week are early — by years, not quarters.
Key Facts:
- • Stripe and Advent International bid $60.50 per share for PayPal — more than $53 billion, a 28% premium — with roughly $50 billion in committed bank financing — CNBC/Reuters, July 15, 2026
- • PayPal’s board reportedly views the offer as undervaluing the company; a meeting is expected as soon as July 20, with Goldman Sachs and Evercore advising — Bloomberg, July 2026
- • Stripe was valued at $159 billion in a February 2026 employee tender offer, up from roughly $140 billion months earlier — CNBC, February 24, 2026
- • Stripe’s total payment volume reached $1.9 trillion in 2025, up 34% year on year — Bloomberg, February 24, 2026
- • A combined Stripe–PayPal would process roughly $3.7 trillion annually, per PSE Consulting — Crowdfund Insider, July 2026
- • The offer values PayPal at roughly 9.5 times earnings; PayPal brings Braintree’s ~$600 billion in processing volume — FF News, July 2026
- • Polymarket’s “Stripe acquires PayPal in 2026” market jumped to 82% on the bid reports — Polymarket, July 15, 2026
What’s actually happening: a private company bidding for a public one
Strip away the headline number and the structure is unusual. Stripe — a venture-backed private company — has joined private-equity firm Advent International in a bid to take an S&P 500 constituent private, splitting ownership equally, with no plan to dismantle the target. The $60.50-a-share offer landed on July 15, 2026, though an earlier approach in April went unanswered, and FinanceFeeds covered the exploratory talks when Stripe first explored acquiring PayPal earlier this year. PayPal’s board is expected to meet as soon as July 20; by July 17, sources were briefing that the board considers $60.50 too low — the classic opening move of a negotiation, not a rejection of the logic.
Why would Stripe want a 26-year-old payments brand that has spent three years fighting checkout-share erosion? Because PayPal owns what Stripe has never had: consumer relationships. The PayPal button, Venmo, and a card portfolio give the combined group both sides of every transaction, and Braintree adds roughly $600 billion in enterprise processing volume. Stripe’s own trajectory supplies the other half of the rationale — $1.9 trillion in 2025 payment volume, growing 34% a year, with its revenue products on track for a $1 billion annual run rate in 2026. The strategic case is a full-stack commerce company touching $3.7 trillion in annual flows.
“The proposed takeover would be one of the payments industry’s most significant transactions in years,” said Chris Jones, Managing Director at PSE Consulting, who produced that $3.7 trillion estimate. (Crowdfund Insider)
Industry response: rivals reprice, partners lean in, PayPal holds out
The board’s “undervalued” posture is the first concrete response, and it matters for the Stripe stock question directly: a sweetened bid — bankers expect negotiations to run weeks — means more debt or more equity, and either deepens Stripe’s commitment to staying private through the integration. Adyen, Checkout.com and Worldpay are the passive beneficiaries; large merchants wary of buying processing from the company that also owns the PayPal button have started pricing the “neutral processor” hedge, a dynamic that lifted Adyen on the announcement.
Stripe’s own ecosystem, meanwhile, keeps compounding the private-markets flywheel. Its Tempo blockchain is being tested by Visa, Nubank, Shopify and Klarna — with Klarna issuing its KlarnaUSD stablecoin on the rails — part of the same crypto re-entry FinanceFeeds examined in why Stripe is exploring crypto payments again. Circle felt the competitive edge of that ecosystem when the Stripe-backed Open USD consortium launched with more than 140 partners and knocked 20% off CRCL in a month. Each of these moves adds enterprise value that private investors mark up in tender offers — without a public listing ever being required.
On the IPO question itself, Stripe’s leadership has been unambiguous. “For us right now, an IPO would be a solution in search of a problem,” said John Collison, Co-founder and President at Stripe. “We have a self-funding business that’s growing very well with lots of new products that we want to go create and so we just don’t need the extra capital right now.” Going public, he added, is not “one of our top five or ten or twenty priorities.” (CNBC)
The Stripe stock math: what $159 billion buys, and what it doesn’t
Put the two companies side by side and the arbitrage at the heart of this deal becomes visible.
| Metric | Stripe (private) | PayPal (at $60.50 offer) |
|---|---|---|
| Valuation | $159bn (Feb 2026 tender) | ~$53bn |
| 2025 payment volume | $1.9tn (+34% y/y) | ~$1.7tn incl. Braintree’s ~$600bn |
| Earnings multiple | Private-market growth pricing | ~9.5× earnings |
| Consumer accounts | None (merchant-side) | 439 million |
| Liquidity for holders | Periodic tender offers | Public float (pre-deal) |
Sources: CNBC and Bloomberg (Feb 24, 2026); Reuters/CNBC and FF News (July 15–16, 2026). Table compiled July 17, 2026.
The valuation timeline shows how deliberately this machine has been built. Stripe peaked at $95 billion in 2021, was marked down to $50 billion in the 2023 venture winter, recovered to roughly $140 billion by late 2025 — FinanceFeeds tracked that round-trip in Stripe’s $140 billion valuation amid the ongoing IPO delay — and reached $159 billion in February 2026. Across that entire five-year cycle, employees got liquidity, investors got allocation, and the public markets got nothing. Three tender offers did the job three IPOs would have done, without a single quarterly earnings call, short seller, or index-fund flow. The 34% payment-volume growth rate is what makes the model self-sustaining: as long as the operating numbers compound faster than late-stage investors’ hurdle rates, someone will always fund the next liquidity round at a higher mark.
The synthesis no single report states: Stripe is being priced by its investors at growth multiples while it bids for PayPal’s earnings at 9.5 times — and the tender-offer mechanism is what lets both prices coexist. February’s $159 billion round was funded by Thrive Capital, Coatue and a16z buying employee shares; it delivered the liquidity an IPO would provide, at a valuation no public listing of a payments processor would currently support, with PayPal itself as the live comparable at a fraction of the multiple. An IPO would force those two prices into one. Staying private keeps the spread — and lets Stripe spend cheaply-financed debt on cheaply-priced public assets.
So can you buy Stripe stock in 2026? Not on any exchange. Stripe has no ticker, no listed shares, and no announced IPO date; the only sellers are employees and early holders in company-run tender offers, and the only buyers are the institutions invited into them. Retail exposure exists solely through the secondary pre-IPO platforms and brokers now packaging private-market access — a demand wave FinanceFeeds covered when CMC Markets expanded into pre-IPO trading — where units typically trade at premiums to the last tender price and with none of a listed stock’s disclosure. That scarcity is itself informative: SpaceX’s June debut showed what happens when a decade of pent-up private-market demand finally meets a ticker, and FinanceFeeds documented how the SpaceX IPO crushed every tokenized proxy that had tried to front-run it.
The regulatory gauntlet: 12 to 18 months of scrutiny either way
If PayPal’s board engages, the deal moves into an antitrust review that will define the timeline. A combination of the two most recognisable online checkout brands invites scrutiny from the US Department of Justice and the European Commission, with the PayPal button’s merchant penetration as the central market-definition fight — a 12-to-18-month process on any realistic reading. The stablecoin layer adds a second regulatory dimension: FinCEN’s Payment Stablecoin Issuer rules take effect July 18, 2026, and unified ownership of Stripe’s stablecoin-first stack alongside PayPal’s PYUSD would concentrate exactly the issuer-level obligations regulators are now formalising.
Integration sceptics add a technical objection to the regulatory one. “Stripe’s stablecoin-first model and PayPal’s multi-coin approach are fundamentally different technology stacks that are not easily combined,” said Stefan Deiss, Co-founder at The Hashgraph Group. (Crowdfund Insider) The tension cuts both ways: a long review delays any IPO thinking still further, but a blocked deal would return $50 billion of committed financing to a company that would suddenly have no acquisition to fund — and restless late-stage investors holding a $159 billion mark.
What happens next: three paths for Stripe stock
Prediction one: no Stripe IPO before 2028 if the PayPal deal closes. Servicing a ~$50 billion debt package while integrating 439 million accounts, Braintree, Venmo and two incompatible stablecoin stacks is a multi-year programme, and taking that story public mid-integration would mean listing at the moment of maximum messiness. The causal chain runs one way: deal closes → integration consumes 2027 → earliest credible listing window 2028–2029.
Prediction two: if the bid fails, the tender-offer cadence accelerates instead. Thrive, Coatue and a16z did not underwrite a $159 billion mark to wait indefinitely; a collapsed deal plus restless holders makes an annual liquidity event the path of least resistance — and keeps the IPO question alive precisely because it remains unanswered. Watch for tender number three within 12 months of any deal break — likely at a mark above $159 billion, because a failed bid signals ambition, not weakness, to the late-stage funds competing for allocation.
Prediction three: the “stripe stock” search demand keeps compounding regardless. Every headline in this saga — the bid, the board fight, a sweetened offer, an antitrust challenge — renews retail interest in a share that cannot be bought, the same dynamic that made SpaceX the most front-run listing in history. The asset that demand actually reaches, for now, is the secondary pre-IPO market and whatever regulated wrappers brokers build around it. When Stripe finally does list — and the Collison brothers’ “not a priority” has always carried an implicit yet — it will arrive as the most anticipated fintech IPO ever priced, with this month’s $53 billion bid as the moment the market started counting.
FAQ
When is the Stripe IPO?
There is no announced Stripe IPO date. Co-founder John Collison said in February 2026 that an IPO would be “a solution in search of a problem” and is not among the company’s top twenty priorities. If the $53 billion PayPal acquisition closes, integration realistically pushes any listing to 2028 or later.
Can you buy Stripe stock right now?
No. Stripe has no ticker and no publicly traded shares. Liquidity happens through company-run tender offers — the latest valued Stripe at $159 billion in February 2026 — and limited secondary pre-IPO platforms, which carry premiums and minimal disclosure.
What is Stripe’s valuation in 2026?
$159 billion, set by a February 2026 tender offer funded by Thrive Capital, Coatue, a16z and others, per CNBC. That is up from roughly $140 billion in late 2025 and a $50 billion trough in 2023, against $1.9 trillion in 2025 payment volume.
Will Stripe acquire PayPal?
Unresolved. Stripe and Advent bid $60.50 per share (over $53 billion) on July 15, 2026; PayPal’s board reportedly views the offer as too low, and Polymarket’s completion market for 2026 sat at 82% after the bid. A sweetened offer or a longer negotiation are both live scenarios, followed by a 12-to-18-month antitrust review.
What would a Stripe IPO be worth?
Unknowable precisely, but the anchors are the $159 billion private mark, PayPal’s ~9.5× earnings multiple as the public comparable, and a combined ~$3.7 trillion in annual payment volume if the acquisition completes — a tension between growth pricing and payments-sector multiples that the listing itself would resolve.
Does the PayPal bid make a Stripe IPO more likely?
In the near term, less likely: the deal is debt-financed, integration-heavy and antitrust-exposed, all of which favour staying private. Longer term, a successful integration creates exactly the scaled, full-stack story that the largest fintech IPO on record would be built on.