Fast forward to 2026: PayPal just fired its CEO, the stock is sitting at its lowest level since 2017 (sub-$44), and the company is trading at ~7.4x forward earnings.
A few years ago, the narrative was that PayPal was a long-term fintech winner with strong leadership and a durable moat. That did not age well.
In addition to the below comments, PayPal is also one of the few major platforms who add a fee for Chargebacks which leads to frauds where users could send money to a YouTuber, Gamedev, or Streamer via a paypal link, let’s say $1, and then take the money back, resulting in a $15 loss to said Streamer.
There were a couple of high profile cases of this a while back where PayPal saw this happen and chose not to settle the fees, because it was within their terms to charge them regardless of the cause.
Turns out that fucking over your customers is not the best business model. Who knew?