Two weeks ago I wrote up the Reuters report that Stripe and Advent had offered $53B for PayPal. That post was mostly reporting, plus some structural background on operating models and processing volumes. This one is opinion. You have been warned.

Let me start with the disclaimer that matters. I am not a financial analyst. I have no idea whether paying roughly 7x PayPal’s ~$8B in EBIT is a bargain or bizare. Kenneth Suchoski at Autonomous Research put the implied multiple at about 11x 2027 NOPAT and called the financing “a lot of debt to put on this asset,” which sounds about right to me, but he does this for a living and I do not.

What I do know something about is payment networks, merchant behavior, and consumer adoption. On those three dimensions I have 3 concerns: