Stripe said to abandon $50B pursuit of PayPal

I've deleted my PayPal account last year and haven't regretted it. Admittedly it helped a lot that I live in Norway now where everyone uses Vipps (which is so much better), and PayPal is not a thing at all.

Makes sense: > The takeover interest has helped it recover, with PayPal shares jumping more than 40% this quarter to give the company a market value of about $52.6 billion. Seems like they tried to buy a struggling company and leaks of the talks made it too expensive.

PayPal might still be the sweetheart, but there's no innovation I feel. With eBay having CC support and being able to charge and return a charge back to the card, PayPal now is in a niche. I'm helping a founder recruit. To handle the load of candidates, we give folks applying some $ for doing a small 1hr project, and Claude told me that PayPal may still be universal way of sending a "gift amounts". I often wonder how much work would it be to bring IBAN accounts to the US. The need for Zelle baffles me, and the fact that person A can't send $ to person B via normal bank infrastructure is interesting.

Diligence told them they’re buying a almost dead payment processor with ancient tech. Customer lists are worth something but not that much.

There is us fair competition law Sherman anti trust act laws. "is a United States antitrust law which prescribes the rule of free competition among those engaged in commerce and consequently prohibits unfair monopolies" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherman_Antitrust_Act