Digital-payments pioneer PayPal is in a yearslong rut. Enrique Lores is tasked with saving it.

The 61-year-old was named chief executive of PayPal earlier this year after decades at HP and its predecessor company, Hewlett-Packard, which he played a key role in splitting up. Lores has since announced an ambitious turnaround plan for PayPal that includes reorganizing its business lines and slashing at least $1.5 billion in costs -- moves reminiscent of the playbook he has deployed in his previous roles.

Now, one of PayPal's rivals has lobbed a buyout offer.

Payments company Stripe and private-equity firm Advent International have made a joint takeover bid for PayPal, valued at some $53 billion, The Wall Street Journal reported last week. The approach, made in recent days, represented about a 30% premium to PayPal's recent stock price. Shares jumped 17% on Wednesday after the news broke.

The deal would bring together major players in the payments world -- PayPal's vast network of consumers and recognizable brands, and Stripe's business providing transaction-processing infrastructure for merchants. Such heft would be an advantage in a rapidly changing payments ecosystem, which is poised to undergo further disruption from new tech like artificial intelligence and stablecoins.

PayPal's peer-to-peer payment app Venmo may be particularly desirable. Its revenue rose 20% last year, and it boasts 67 million monthly active users who skew younger and more affluent.

A deal would also transform one of Silicon Valley's most storied companies, whose yellow-and-blue button has long ruled online payments. PayPal's founders and early employees are seen as the stuff of legend among startups, with the ranks of the so-called PayPal mafia, such as Elon Musk and Peter Thiel, going on to invest in or launch businesses that have become corporate heavyweights.

Shares in PayPal, meanwhile, have been on a precipitous fall amid competition from the likes of Apple Pay, Google Pay and Cash App.

In February, PayPal announced that Lores would take over as CEO in a surprise shuffle. A profit warning accompanied the appointment, and the company's stock slid 19%.

Analysts saw Lores's history helping to break up Hewlett-Packard and then managing HP as clues of what could be in store for PayPal.

From billboards to boardrooms

Lores, a native of Spain, joined Hewlett-Packard in 1989 as an engineering intern in San Diego, and then worked full-time in his home country. He rose to lead the division that made printing technology for large formats, such as signs or billboards. He moved to Silicon Valley in 2008 and eventually held roles overseeing the company's worldwide business laptops and customer service.

In 2015, Hewlett-Packard split itself in two: HP Inc. took the printer and personal-computer businesses, while Hewlett Packard Enterprise, or HPE, would sell software, servers and other services. Lores was in charge of simplifying the organization and reducing its cost structure before the split was finalized. The company later described him as "a key architect of one of the largest and most complex corporate separations in business history."

Lores landed with HP and eventually became CEO in 2019, as the company faced slowing sales and souring investor sentiment, and got to work. He announced plans to cut up to 16% of the company's 55,000 employees, yielding $1 billion in cost cuts, and increase its stock buybacks by billions.

Lores has dealt with suitors trying to upend his turnaround plans before. In late 2019, just days after Lores took over as HP's chief, Xerox, backed by activist investor Carl Icahn, launched a takeover bid for HP that would later become hostile. Xerox upped the pressure on HP for months until the pandemic prompted it to abandon the pursuit, citing economic and health impacts.

Shares of HP climbed during the pandemic as it benefited from more people buying equipment to work from home.

Lores joined PayPal's board in 2021 and was selected as chair in 2024.

A new fixer-upper

Lores was brought in at PayPal after the company's namesake checkout button, which lets customers pay on a range of websites, posted weak growth to end 2025. Ambitious plans by PayPal's past two CEOs had also failed to materialize.

In 2021, for instance, PayPal was enjoying a pandemic-induced boom in e-commerce when then-CEO Dan Schulman laid out a grand growth strategy. The plans included rolling out a "super-app" that would offer payments, shopping tools, savings accounts and stock and crypto trading. Later that year, PayPal explored a potential $40-billion-plus acquisition of Pinterest, which it dropped when news leaked and shareholders balked.

The company got a reality check in 2022 as in-store shopping recovered from the pandemic. Its growth slowed and its stock plunged, and PayPal abandoned its most ambitious targets. Schulman stepped down in 2023, handing the reins to Intuit executive Alex Chriss.

Chriss stumbled out of the gate, overpromising to "shock the world" with a suite of product announcements that failed to inspire. The company, which lost market share to rivals like Apple Pay, underwent rounds of layoffs to cut costs.

Lores struck a more subtle tone. He has espoused a vision of modernizing PayPal's technology and slashing costs aggressively to reinvest in growth.

He reorganized the business, creating a stand-alone consumer unit that houses Venmo, and has argued the company can be a go-to for consumers' other financial activities.

Now Lores could be overseeing another big corporate deal. He has emphasized his focus on maximizing shareholder value and has said the company should look at "optimizing our portfolio," sometimes seen as Wall Street code for selling parts of the business.

PayPal hasn't responded to Strive and Advent's offer.

Write to Ben Glickman at ben.glickman@wsj.com and Peter Rudegeair at peter.rudegeair@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

July 19, 2026 13:00 ET (17:00 GMT)

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