Stripe Walked Away From PayPal at $53B. Would You Still Join PayPal in 2026?

The Stripe–PayPal deal appears to be dead.

Stripe and Advent reportedly offered around $53B / $60.50 per share for PayPal, but PayPal’s board viewed the offer as too low. Now the consortium has reportedly walked away from the acquisition. PayPal stock dropped sharply after the news.

The M&A story itself is interesting, but I think there’s a much more relevant question for engineers:

Would you actually want to join PayPal right now?

PayPal is in a strange position.

It’s still a massive payments company with hundreds of millions of users and a very recognizable brand.

But it’s also a company that has spent years trying to rediscover growth while newer payment products like Apple Pay, Shop Pay, Stripe and others have changed the competitive landscape.

And now we know that at least one serious buyer looked at PayPal, put roughly $53B on the table, and ultimately couldn’t agree with management on what the business was worth.

From an engineer’s perspective, I can see two completely different ways to interpret this.

Bull case:

PayPal could actually be a pretty interesting turnaround company to join.

There’s a huge installed user base, Venmo, payments infrastructure, crypto/stablecoin exposure, and now potentially agentic commerce. If management can actually modernize the product, engineers joining during a turnaround could get meaningful scope.

Bear case:

You’re joining a mature company fighting to regain relevance while going through cost cutting, restructuring, and constant pressure to improve margins.

That can easily translate into reorgs, tighter headcount, weaker promotions, and projects getting reprioritized every few quarters.

And this is where I think career decisions get much more interesting than stock analysis.

Imagine you had:

PayPal Senior SWE — $300K TC

vs.

Stripe Senior SWE — $350K TC

vs.

Meta / Google — $350–400K TC

Would PayPal need to pay a meaningful premium for you to take the turnaround risk?

Or could the opposite be true — maybe joining a company that has something to prove gives you better scope than becoming employee #50,000 at another Big Tech company?

I’d especially like to hear from people currently at PayPal or who interviewed there recently:

Has the engineering culture actually changed?

• Are teams still hiring?
• How are refreshers and promotions?
• How much reorg / layoff anxiety is there internally?
• And does PayPal still feel like a strong place for an engineer to spend the next 3–5 years?

If you’re at PayPal now or interviewed there recently, even a small datapoint would be useful. The acquisition headlines tell us what investors think about PayPal — I’m more interested in what engineers inside the company think about PayPal.