Motley Fool Money - Does PayPal Have a Buyer?

Episode Date: July 15, 2026

Stripe is reportedly circling PayPal in a deal that could end a frustrating run for the fintech giant, but is it a good enough deal to get done? We discuss that and Johnson & Johnson’s earnings, plus how Uber has become the incumbent in autonomous vehicles.Travis Hoium, Lou Whiteman, and Rachel Warren discuss:- PayPal’s Offer- How Stripe Gets a Deal Done- Why PayPal Says “No”- J&J’s Earnings- Uber in DC- How Uber Became the IncumbentCompanies discussed: Uber (UBER), Johnson & Johnson (JNJ), Uber (UBER).Host: Travis HoiumGuests: Lou Whiteman, Rachel WarrenEngineer: Kristi Waterworth Advertisements are sponsored content and provided for informational purposes only. The Motley Fool and its affiliates (collectively, “TMF”) do not endorse, recommend, or verify the accuracy or completeness of the statements made within advertisements. TMF is not involved in the offer, sale, or solicitation of any securities advertised herein and makes no representations regarding the suitability, or risks associated with any investment opportunity presented. Investors should conduct their own due diligence and consult with legal, tax, and financial advisors before making any investment decisions. TMF assumes no responsibility for any losses or damages arising from this advertisement. We’re committed to transparency: All personal opinions in advertisements from Fools are their own. The product advertised in this episode was loaned to TMF and was returned after a test period or the product advertised in this episode was purchased by TMF. Advertiser has paid for the sponsorship of this episode. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit ⁠megaphone.fm/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

PayPal may finally have a buyer. Monica Who's Hidden Gems Investing starts now. Jim's investing, I'm Travis Moyam, joined today by Lou Whiteman and Rachel Warren. And guys, we may finally have a deal for the company that has been kind of on the block, kind of a value stock, kind of a what in the world are they doing there? PayPal. So, Rachel, what did we find out this morning and overnight about Stripe potentially buying the company? Major breaking news report.

So Payments Giant Stripe and private equity firm, Advent, International have reportedly submitted a joint confidential proposal to buy PayPal for $60.50 a share. That would value PayPal at over $53 billion. As of the stock's closing price yesterday, that was a 28% premium based on their share price at the time. The deal is reportedly backed by about $50 billion in committed bank financing. Now, what's interesting about this is under the terms of the proposal, both Stripe and Advent would take equal stakes to run PayPal as a 50-50 joint partnership. the idea would be to keep the company intact rather than, you know, breaking it up or selling off its core assets. Going back to that $53 billion valuation based on the reported terms of the offer,

this is tracking to be larger than the years ago Musk's purchase of Twitter for $44 billion, but it also really highlights how far PayPal has fallen from its pandemic era peak back in 2021. I mean, back in those days, it posted a market cap of about $360 billion. This is interesting, right? I mean, this is in the middle of what some might call kind of a chaotic internal transition for PayPal. They've got the new president and CEO. He's been pushing a turnaround plan targeting over a billion in cost savings. Now for Stripe, this is still a private company. We've heard a lot of reports that they might go public in the last few years. Their private valuation is reportedly around $160 billion. So absorbing PayPal could really be a massive way to scale their footprint.

Obviously, grants them access to hundreds of millions of active consumer accounts. It would match that consumer brand that PayPal has with Stripe's backend developer infrastructure could also hand them a place within the digital currency race as they absorb PayPal's staple coin into their ecosystem. Now, we haven't seen any response from PayPal, you know, formally responding to these initial overtures. Wall Street seemed happy in early trading, but there's still a lot that we don't know, guys. Yeah, Lou, that is the thing here is if you squint, some of this makes a little bit of sense, but then you look at the structure, 50-50 deal, Stripe is kind of buying PayPal and kind of not, can't exactly fold it into your current business, at least seamlessly.

This also puts Stripe in a little bit of a strange position because a lot of the payment companies have built on top of Stripe and now you're a competitor with PayPal. What should we think about this strategically and how does the private equity piece of this play into it in your mind? Yeah, a lot of thoughts here. I mean, for once, so Strite is kind of building their own PayPal. So I guess they don't worry about the competition as much as I do. I think you're right.

I think that would be kind of an awkward. conversation, but they either feel like they have to get there, so they just need to, or they're not worried about that. Here's the thing. There is value in PayPal. There really is. It's a good brand. I don't particularly like the stock. I don't think this is going to work. For one thing, you're always with these things, somebody leaked it, who leaked it. And it's the acquirers who leaked it. This was the offer was made a month ago or so. This is to try. That was the other thing that stuck out to me is it's apparently been on the table for a while. Yeah, this is trying to light a fire under PayPal to get a response. And here's the thing. The value in PayPal for me right now is their

cash flow, $6 billion of free cash flow. This is a mature company. This is a company that I don't think has a natural pathway for growth. It makes sense to take it private. The advent side of this deal makes all the sense of the world. Use that cash flow to pay down the debt you take on and create value that way. That's just private equity 101. There's a tension here though, right? Because a private equity firm has a different motivation and different set of goals than a growthy fintech. And this 50-50 partnership, if done right, I guess, is possible. But there is some inherent tension of running it for advance needs versus running it for whatever reason. Stripe thinks to need it. It's not impossible, but there's a lot of ways you can go wrong. I think PayPal will

reject this. The other thing to note here is because they're such a mature company, about 75% of their ownership is institutional. And I'll be honest with you, if I was sitting at that desk, I don't want to own PayPal personally. But if I was one of those institutional holders and I was looking at that cash flow, I would want at least 80. It starts with 80. So I don't think, and I could be way off here, but I don't think for the people who matter, if the shareholders that could pressure PayPal to the table, I think there's still a long way to go before this makes sense. Lou, I wanted to ask about this would be a private company being involved in buying a public company, which means that that in theory, unless they're going to go public through the backdoor of buying PayPal,

which I don't think is probably the case. Like Rachel said, $160 billion valuation in private markets. But that's private markets. And a lot of these companies, PayPal Adyen, have taken it on the chin over the past year or so. So that number may not actually be what the market is going to bear. So they're going to have to come up with the capital. I think the reports are they make a couple billion dollars in free cash flow. I have seen numbers that almost all, of this deal could be funded with debt through that private equity piece. What I guess I worry about with a company like Stripe is this was supposed to be one of the hot fintechs, one of the great IPOs potentially coming to the market. And now you're looking at potentially levering up a business

that I don't know if it's fundamentally in decline, but there's at least a lot of questions about how profitable these payment infrastructure companies are going to be in the future. So is that a massive risk to think about? Stripe is just kind of making a last gasp effort to grow. the business when there's not a lot of growth necessarily left in the core business. If Stripe is public, that would be a big worry of mine. I think another way of saying what you're saying is that I don't want their cash to go to just paying off the debt if they have opportunities to grow. The thing is, again, PayPal generates so much cash.

I do think that whether it's Advent 100% or Stripe involved, I do think that the target's cash flows can basically cover the debt or go a long way for there. So I think it is more what can we partner with? How can we make this synergistic? But look, on that $160 billion number, that is great until you have to try to deploy it. There's a lot of great reasons to be a private company. But one of the great things about being a public company is price discovery. There are millions of people giving their opinion every day on what the value of your shares are. First is just a couple of people desperate to get in and a couple of employees desperate to get out.

You tend to have higher valuations in private companies. companies for that reason. This might be more intriguing if they were trying to use it as some crazy way to go public where they are just putting their arguably overvalued shares to work to swallow this up and generate that cash flow. That might be a neater deal. Then we're talking sort of like Rocket Laberidium where a young growth company is buying a cash stream. This is just sort of a convoluted mess right now. I see a world where PayPal is taken private. I think it makes a lot of sense in a P.E. portfolio. The Stripe element, I think they have to go significantly higher to make this work. I could be wrong here, but I do think that. And if so, how far can Stripe go?

Definitely a lot that we'll be covering in the future, because PayPal's been one of these companies that looks like a value stock for a very long time, but the stock just hasn't worked for investors, and maybe this is the best path out. When we come back, we're going to talk about Johnson and Johnson's earnings. You're listening to Motley Fool, Hidden Jems, investing. Introducing Fidelity Trader Plus, the next generation of advanced trading from Fidelity. Customize your tools and charts and access them seamlessly across desktop, web, and mobile. For faster trades, anywhere you go. Try the all-new Fidelity Trader Plus.

Learn more about our most powerful trading platform yet at Fidelity.com slash Trader Plus. Investing involves risk, including risk of loss. Fidelity Brokridge Services, LLC, member NYS-I-S-P-C. Welcome back to Motley Fool, Hidden Gems, investing. Johnson and Johnson reported earnings this morning. Results look solid. At least pre-market, the market didn't like what it saw. But Rachel, what do you think about the results from J&J?

A few key numbers here. So Johnson and Johnson, they brought in just over $25 billion in revenue for the quarter. That was up about 7% from a year ago, adjusted earnings per share of $2.90. That was up about 5% year over year. Both on the top and bottom line, they beat Wall Street's expectations. And, you know, management actually has. hiked their full-year sales guidance to over $101 billion. That's putting Johnson and Johnson on track to cross that $100 billion milestone for the very first time in a roughly 140-year

history as a company through all its iterations. Now, what didn't investors like? There was a minor revenue miss in their medical device division, their med tech division. They saw a slight drop in sales for their abio-med heart pumps. But I think also we're seeing some hyper-fixation on short-term patent anxieties. Now, this is something that flicks the life cycle of every pharmaceutical even the biggest and best in the world. For a long time, they have generated tremendous growth from their blockbuster drug Solara. That is a drug that is now seeing a lot of competition from biosimilers. And so that's dragging down some of their legacy numbers.

Now, I'm a long-term shareholder of Johnson & Johnson. If you're a long-term investor in this business, I think today's drop, at least in the early morning hours, this is short-term market noise. You know, this is a business that has increased its payout for over six decades every single year in counting. They have a very diversified revenue. diversified revenue engine. They have a lot of newer business additions as well from new blockbuster drugs and they're rolling out their next-gen blockbusters. No major patent risks until the early 2030s beyond Stalara. So a lot to like about this business.

Yeah, Rachel summed up pretty well. One note on the MedTech business, I think it's an interesting aspect. We don't think of healthcare as cyclical because people are always getting sick and always need to get better, right? But there is a cyclical element in here and I think, you know, the MedTech part, Yesterday we saw intuitive surgical down a lot and a lot of device companies and supply companies fall. HCA, the big public hospital chain, said the number of surgeries they performed in the quarter are down. To me, that says that whatever is going with the med tech business, that isn't a J&J problem. That isn't anything specific to them. That's a macro problem.

But it is, I think, as investors, that's just the cyclicality of health care. We don't want to get political here, but there are a lot of reasons why that surgeries may go down right now from health care coverage to economic woes. We saw this in the pandemic where, you know, surgeries just went down. That's probably the most obvious example. But I think for J&JN's investors and intuitive surgical, too, I don't think there's anything to worry about when you see it affecting everybody. But it is sort of just an interesting odd thing. I don't think we think of it with health care is that there is a cyclicality there.

Yeah, you would think that raising guidance, I think both on the top and bottom line would be a good thing for a stock. But investors don't seem to think that at least early in trading shares are down about 0.6% as we're recording. We'll see where this one goes in the future. When we come back, we're going to talk about the drama that Uber is having in Washington, D.C. You're listening to Motley Fool, Hidden Gems, investing. Hey, Fidelity. What's it cost to invest with the Fidelity app? Start with as little as $1 with no account fees or trade commissions on U.S. stocks and ETFs. Hmm, that's music to my ears. I can only talk. Investing involves risk, including risk of loss. Zero account fees apply to retail brokerage accounts only. Commission does not apply to customers designated by Fidelity as a professional equity trader. A limited number of VTFs are subject to a service fee of $100.

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We've talked a lot on this show, at least especially on Wednesdays, about Uber autonomous vehicles in the future of that business long term. I'm a bull on Uber's case as the disruptor and the aggregator, but Lou seems like they're taking a little bit of a different approach in D.C. They are not acting like a disruptor anymore, Travis. Uber is acting like a nervous dinosaur, a nervous incumbent, period, okay? I actually hate that you're making, I think, a compelling argument that that is the case. And I'm not going to rubbing your face and say, we were talking about this a year ago, Travis, so we should have seen this comment, right? But look, the good news here is that, for all of us is, is that I think the age of autonomy has arrived. Companies tend to act as partners and be friendly and work together when technology is experimental, when we're just trying to figure it out.

The second that it has arrived, that's when the knives come out and they fight. And that is really what's going on. In Washington specifically, Waymo would like to just operate. Waymo. Uber opposes the bill that would allow this. And they have been lobbied instead for a system that will require robo taxis to operate on a ride hailing network that also uses human drivers. So as you catch that, they would like Waymo to have to go to. an existing third-party network. I don't know who that would be. I mean, Lyft, maybe, but I think we know what they're trying to do. Here's the thing. Uber doesn't have a driverless solution. That was their choice. And it probably was a good choice considering the money that they'd have to spend. But

their product at this moment is their inventory of customers. It is very, very important for them to make sure that that product is exposed to the surface, that you can't bypass that product. 15 years ago, Uber was a disruptor. They were the ones trying to tear down regular. They were the ones trying to rip out the rules. Now, they are the defenders of the horse carriage in the age of the automobile. Their goal is to use regulatory capture, regulation to slow down the transition, not disrupt the status quo that works pretty well for them.

It will work for a while. It's a very compelling story. Uber's up there talking about all of the jobs that will be lost, which is really funny if you look back at their narrative over the years, but it won't last forever. And as an investor, I think we have to be aware of that. Yeah, Rachel, the interesting thing, here is it seems like Uber is not opposed to autonomous vehicles. They just want to make sure that

their business model is still intact and is like Lucid not disrupted. The other angle to this and the thing that we've talked about a couple of different times is their strategy is to basically arm as many autonomous vehicle companies as possible. We can get into to Lucid and the challenges that they've had this week, at least in the market. But that's one of the companies that they helped fund. Lucid's working with Nero to bring vehicles, autonomous vehicles to market. Uber is going to be one of the buyers of those vehicles. That's not the only company. There's a half dozen or a dozen companies. But none of them are really hitting market at scale yet. And I think that seems to be the challenge for Uber is you can't use that network to build the autonomous vehicle fleet if the fleet isn't quite ready to hit

the road yet. I think that's right. There's a couple things to look at here. First, just taking a step back, you look at Uber's history, which we touched upon briefly. I mean, over a decade ago, Uber won the ride-sharing war by use of aggressive lobbying to crush a lot of the local tax monopolies. And today they're facing a different threat from driverless cars. Maybe the old playbook isn't working. And as Lou said, you know, there is a lot of lobbying happening on the hill trying to block standalone AVs from taking over, pushing for laws that would force robotaxis to work on these hybrid networks. There was documentation reporting that came out that showed that, you know, in New Jersey, for example, Uber tried to pass a rule that would force any driverless company to have human drivers handle 85% of their rides. Now, we saw Uber and Waymo and their partnership pilot in Phoenix last month. Uber used to pride itself on being this asset light tech company that didn't own cars. They have invested billions to buy the driverless hardware, invest in EV companies like you noted. I mean, hundreds of millions of dollars invested in Lucid. Uber owns, I believe, 11.5% stake. They planned to buy thousands of their electric vehicles. We saw these viral rumors of a Lucid bankruptcy and then Lucid's executives broke their silence. These rumors are completely false. I think it shows how. how fast Lucid is burning through cash that there was such a deep market panic.

But you look at Uber, you know, they've scattered hundreds of millions of dollars across different partners. Lucid, Neuro Cruise, the list goes on. But none of those bets are really scaling yet. And meanwhile, Waymo's dominating the abys space. You know, they've cleared over 500,000 commercial trips every single week at this point. Probably more by now. That's a number that came out a number of months ago.

And Uber, I think, is still trying to catch up. So I do think there's a very real concern here for Uber. I think we're seeing those cracks start to show. It doesn't mean they can't catch up, but I think that they're realizing that the strategies that worked a decade ago are not going to work in the current age. And I think that's what they're trying to figure out. And I got bad news for Lucid holders because I know we're supposed to believe that a lot like other electric vehicle companies, they are this close to a autonomous solution, right? As you say, Uber and Lucid are already partners are already working together. Right now today, Uber could use one third of the cash sitting in their bank to just buy Lucid.

If Lucid had a valid or anywhere close to happening autonomous project, that is the easy button for Uber. Instead, they're off by maybe buying other delivery companies. I think that says all we need to know. I don't want to hear a single bit of hype about Lucid's autonomy being anywhere close. If it was, they'd be a subsidiary of Uber today. It will be very interesting to watch this because the vehicles like Lucid are hitting the road. I'm in the Minneapolis area.

This was often seen as one of the last places that was going to get autonomous vehicles. And my wife once or twice a week says, hey, I saw another Waymo downtown. And I know that May Mobility is here testing in one of the suburbs that we live near. So slowly but surely, we're getting to the business model that the future is going to look like. But it seems like Uber is now on a little bit of a defensive position. As an investor, I want to be plain offense, not defense. But it does make me a little bit nervous. We'll learn more about that in the future.

As always, people on the program may have interests in the stocks they talk about and the Molly Kool may have formal recommendations for or against, but don't buy ourselves to be solely on bunch of your year. All personal finance content follows the Monte Kool's editorial standards. It's not approved by advertisers and advertisements are sponsored content and provided for informational purposes only. You see our full advertising disclosure. Please check out our show notes. For Lou Whiteman, Rachel Warren and Kewaterwood, last I'm Kavish William. Thanks for listening. We'll see you here tomorrow.