Paypal To Acquire Pinterest For $45 Billion, Companies In Late-Stage Talks: Report

PayPal, the Silicon Valley digital payments giant, is currently in talks to acquire Pinterest in a deal valued at $45 billion, according to a report.

PayPal is currently engaged in late-stage talks to buy the digital pinboard company for a potential price of around $70 per share, a person familiar with the discussions told CNBC. Sources for the New York Times say, in total, the deal could be valued at about $45 billion.

The plan for acquisition comes as e-commerce company Shopify ramps up the pressure for its competition, the CNBC source said. Last year, the platform partnered with Affirm to become the exclusive provider of financing for Shop Pay.

If the deal pushes through, it will become the largest acquisition in the consumer internet industry since Microsoft’s $26 billion purchase of LinkedIn in 2016 and Salesforce’s $27.7 billion purchase of Slack in December 2020, according to an analysis by Dealogic, a data service firm.

The deal would also top PayPal’s $4 billion acquisition of Honey Science Corp. in November 2019. The company developed a browser extension that lets shoppers find discount codes to apply to their shopping cart items.

News of the talks between PayPal and Pinterest comes after Dan Schulmann, PayPal’s chief executive, indicated that they plan to make the company a “super app” that offers a variety of services and functions to its users.

“Sometimes we buy things that people don't expect like Honey and people question it, and then you see, as we go into, like there are plans around all the stuff that we think about,” Schulmann told Wall Street analysts at JPMorgan 12th Annual U.S. All-Stars Conference in September, according to Seeking Alpha.

“Hopefully, some of them will be surprising to investors because it means that we're thinking about things and where things are going and not just where they are today.”

Pinterest was founded in 2009 and quickly earned a massive following of people “pinning” home decor, wedding and travel destination images. It is the fastest site in history to reach 10 million unique monthly visitors. As of the second quarter of 2021, the platform had 454 million monthly active users across the globe, according to Statista.

Pinterest went public in April 2019, leading to a 26% increase in its share price and a nearly 50% increase in revenue in 2020 amid the COVID-19 pandemic.