PayPal CEO’s first year was praised by Wall Street, but hard part starts now for struggling payments company
Alex Chriss, CEO of PayPal Inc.
Courtesy: PayPal
In January, about a hundred days into his job as PayPal CEO, Alex Chriss told CNBC’s David Faber that the payments company hadn’t had much to celebrate in recent years. But Chriss confidently said he was prepared to “shock the world.”
“I love being an underdog,” Chriss said in an interview on “Squawk on the Street,” from the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. He was responding to a question about a recent spate of analyst downgrades.
Dan Dolev of Mizuho Securities was among the skeptics. He cut his rating to the equivalent of a hold on Jan. 16, the day before Chriss’ CNBC appearance, headlining his report, “PayPal faces competitive pressure from ‘A’ to ‘Z.'” The A was for Apple Pay, and the Z represented payments app Zelle, a money transfer service jointly owned by seven of the top U.S. banks.
A few weeks later, PayPal issued weak guidance in its fourth-quarter earnings report, knocking the stock down 11% and justifying Dolev’s concerns.
PayPal appeared to be in deep trouble. Its market cap was down more than 80% since peaking in mid-2021. The company had just cut 9% of it workforce, about 2,500 jobs, and was mired in single-digit growth. Analysts across Wall Street saw rising competition and a declining take rate, or the percentage of revenue PayPal keeps from each transaction.
Fast forward to today, and the picture is dramatically brighter for the 26-year-old Silicon Valley company and its 47-year-old CEO.
Chriss hit his one-year anniversary at the helm on Friday. In the third quarter, which ended on Monday, PayPal shares jumped 34%, their biggest quarterly rally since mid-2020, when the early days of the Covid pandemic fueled a surge in online shopping. It was the first time in eight quarters that PayPal outperformed the Nasdaq, which gained just 2.6% in the past three months.
Dolev bolstered his rating back to a buy in May. In July, the company lifted its full-year profit forecast for a second time and increased share repurchases. Chriss said in the earnings release that the company was now “operating from a position of strength.” The stock rose almost 9%, its best day since late 2022.
“I think he’s been nothing but a phenomenal success story so far,” Dolev said. “The news flow has been out of this world amazing, in terms of the way they manage expectations.”
Susquehanna’s James Friedman lifted his rating on PayPal to a buy in early July. He said Chriss was “setting the bar high” with his comments on CNBC, but said he’s been delivering on his bold promise to shareholders.
“You know how he shocked the world?” Friedman said. “He actually beat his numbers.”
Much of Chriss’ early success has been tied to improved transaction margins and better monetization of key acquisitions like Braintree, which is used by Meta for credit card processing, and payments app Venmo, which is becoming more popular with businesses.
Having cut a lot of the fat in the organization and with a renewed focus on profitability, Chriss has finally sparked some excitement on Wall Street after replacing Dan Schulman, who retired following almost a decade as CEO.
“It was time for some new blood at PayPal,” said Dana Stalder, a startup investor at venture firm Matrix Partners who served as PayPal’s commercial chief from 2004 to 2008. “He’s made a lot of changes very quickly, and I think he has substantially increased the focus on the consumer, which is the right thing.”
‘Wholesale changes’ in leadership
Now comes the harder part — reigniting growth.
Analysts are projecting roughly 6% revenue growth when PayPal reports third-quarter results in about a month, according to LSEG. For the fourth quarter, they expect growth of 5.5%. Sales are only expected to get marginally stronger in 2024, with analysts expecting growth of under 8% for the full year.
PayPal didn’t make Chriss available for an interview for this story.
In the July earnings call, Chriss said of the firm’s next steps that “while change takes time and we still have much work ahead of us, we are well positioned today, have the right leadership in place and are moving full steam ahead.”
Chriss, who spent 19 years at tax software provider Intuit prior to joining PayPal, took little time before he started overhauling the management team. In November, he brought in Isabel Cruz from Walmart as chief people officer, Michelle Gill from Intuit to run a new small business and financial services group, Diego Scotti from Verizon to oversee the consumer group as well as marketing and communications, and Jamie Miller from EY as CFO.
“He has turned over, from what I can tell, the vast majority of the leadership team,” Stalder said. “It’s been wholesale changes.”
Early in his tenure, Chriss publicly identified some of the reasons, in his view, that PayPal had been struggling to find its footing. He highlighted an overly aggressive strategy of expansion through deal making.
“We have done too many acquisitions over the last few years, and we’ve been defocused,” Chriss said in the January interview with Faber. “It was one of the things I noticed when I came in 100 days ago.”
Chriss added that the company had narrowed down its priorities to five key things, “all focused on profitable growth.”
The most important metric to fix, he said, was transaction margin dollars, which is how the company gauges the profitability of its core business. Among Chriss’ strategies to address the deteriorating margin was to offer merchants increased value-added services, such as connecting a couple of data points at checkout to drive down the rate of cart abandonment.
He said in January that 35 million merchants use PayPal and “when we improve their conversion rate, it improves their business, it improves our bottom line.”
PayPal noted to shareholders in its latest earnings report that its branded checkout, along with Braintree and Venmo, helped the company achieve its highest growth rate in transaction margin dollars since 2021. Overall transaction margin dollars increased 8% to $3.6 billion.
Susquehanna’s Friedman says a career at Intuit is the perfect training ground for learning how to mastermind a stock recovery. Speaking to executives there is like “talking to a dashboard,” he said.
“The source code to engineer a higher stock is profitability,” Friedman said. Chriss “really boils down his management style to the things that count” and “reducing what’s irrelevant,” he added.
With Venmo, the goal is to turn one of the most popular choices for money transfer from a strictly consumer app, which has no transaction fees, to a product for merchants. DoorDash, Starbucks and Ticketmaster are among businesses now accepting Venmo as one way that consumers can pay.
Singing at the gas pump
Getting competitive at the point-of-sale is another big priority. That’s led PayPal to Will Ferrell.
The company launched a national campaign last month for PayPal Everywhere, offering 5% cash back for using a PayPal debit card within the mobile app. Ferrell, the pitchman, can be seen in a commercial using the PayPal app to buy lemonade and gas, while singing a parody of Fleetwood Mac’s “Everywhere.”
Stalder says PayPal is way behind Apple and Google, which own the dominant smartphone operating systems with their own embedded digital wallets.
“PayPal has been stuck because it’s less convenient than the mobile wallets, number one,” Stalder said. “And number two, it hasn’t worked offline.”
But Stalder sees a real opportunity for PayPal, in part because Apple has just opened the Secure Element on iOS so that other developers can more easily use the phone for contactless payments, putting them on a more equal plane with Apple Pay.
That development allows PayPal to “ride the mobile wallet rails for the first time and make some real headway in offline payments,” Stalder said.
PayPal’s other point-of-sale effort is called Fastlane, a one-click payment option for online sales that can go head-to-head with Apple Pay and Shop Pay by Shopify. In August, fintech platform Adyen made Fastlane available to businesses in the U.S., and said it plans to expand the offering globally in the future.
Chriss told investors on the earnings call that the company is urgently pushing to meet the holiday rush.
“We need to get it on as many platforms as we can so that small businesses in particular can just one-click a button and turn it on for the holidays,” Chriss said. “We’re working with many of our large enterprises who want access to this before the holidays as well.”
‘No drama’
Chriss’ long history at Intuit gave him an intimate understanding of the expansive world of small- and medium-sized businesses. That experience could be crucial as PayPal targets SMBs with its various payment and checkout options.
Sanjay Sakhrani, an analyst at KBW, said going further down market allows PayPal to command better economics because there’s so much more competition when going after enterprises.
“To the extent that they can broaden their reach there, I think that could be quite lucrative,” said Sakhrani, who has a buy rating on the stock.
Chriss calls SMBs an “untapped opportunity for us,” adding on the earnings call that those companies don’t want to “piece together 17 different solutions.”
“Small businesses are – they’re fighting for every customer,” Chriss said in July. “They need to be able to find customers. They need to be able to engage with customers, convert them, and then reengage with them.”
Venture capitalist Oren Zeev has seen Chriss work with small businesses in another capacity. They served together on the board of home design startup Houzz, whose customers include a lot of architects and contractors.
“He obviously brought a lot to the table with his vast experience with small businesses,” Zeev said. As a communicator, Zeev described Chriss as “no drama” and “respected by everyone.”
While he’s quickly captured the respect of investors, who have lifted PayPal’s market cap by over $20 billion in the year since Chriss started, there’s a lot more to do.
The stock remains about 75% below its record high. Sakhrani says shareholders are “anxiously awaiting his multiple-year outlook” as opposed to just “trying to fix some of the stuff that was broken.”
“There’s going to be some pressure at some point in time, in the near future, for more definition around that,” Sakhrani said.
Chriss, for his part, isn’t declaring victory.
“Our teams are moving with urgency, excited about our innovation and focused on execution,” he said on the second-quarter earnings call. “We are still early in our transformation and while pleased with our progress in many areas, we know there is much more we can do and with greater speed.”
WATCH: PayPal’s crypto lead on allowing merchants to buy and sell virtual assets
Honda’s patent filings offer a clear glimpse into the company’s plans for an ultra-affordable electric motorcycle, integrating a proven chassis with a simple electric powertrain. It’s a clear glimpse into how the world’s most prolific motorcycle maker plans to challenge the nascent electric motorcycle market.
The filings in Honda’s new patent show a bike built around the familiar platform of the Honda Shine 100, a best-selling commuter in India, reimagined in electric form for a cost-effective future of urban mobility.
According to Cycle World’s Ben Purvis, Honda’s patent sketches outline a design that repurposes the Shine’s sturdy frame and chassis mounting points to house an electric motor and compact battery setup. Positioned where the engine once sat, a mid-motor drives the rear wheel via a single-speed reduction gear and chain – mirroring the essentials of the original gasoline-powered commuter bike.
Instead of a traditional fuel tank, the design features two lithium-ion battery packs, angled forward on either side of the spine frame and fitting neatly into the existing geometry.
What makes the bike revealed in this patent even more interesting isn’t just its clever packaging, but rather the platform. By leveraging the proven Shine chassis, Honda can significantly cut development costs, manufacturing complexity, and market price. That’s a big statement given that surviving in price-sensitive markets like India demands simplicity and reliability. And by piggybacking off a proven platform, Honda can dramatically reduce the time to market from the time the boardroom bigwigs give the project the final green light.
The design still seems to feature styling that would be fairly consistent with the Shine 100, even down to a gas cap-like circular protrusion likely on top of a faux-tank. Some electric motorcycles in the past have used this location to hide a charging port, keeping similar form and function to outdated fuel tanks and fill ports, though it’s not clear if that is Honda’s intention.
It’s not clear what power level Honda could be targeting, but the Shine bike from which Honda’s creation draws its design inspiration could provide some clues. The Honda Shine 100 features a 99cc engine that provides around 7.3 horsepower (around 5.5 kW) and has a top speed of 85 km/h (53 mph), solidly planting it in the commuter segment of motorcycles.
The electric motorcycle in Honda’s design would be unlikely to target much higher performance as it would drastically increase the required battery capacity, and thus similar speeds of around 80-85 km/h (50-53 mph) would seem likely.
There also appears to be no active cooling, which would also limit the amount of power that Honda would be likely to draw continuously. The patent describes a channel formed by the two battery packs, leading to the speed controller and creating ducted cooling that pulls heat out of the batteries and electronics without drawing extra power.
This emerging design is just one piece of Honda’s broader electric two-wheeler strategy. Their entry-level EM1 e: and Activa e: scooters launched with mobile battery packs and budget-friendly pricing. Meanwhile, high-tech concepts continually push the envelope. But this Shine-based bike aims squarely at the heart of mainstream affordability – a move likely to resonate with millions of new electric riders in developing regions like India where traditionally-styled small-dsiplacement motorcycles reign supreme.
Honda hasn’t revealed a timeline or pricing yet, but Honda’s patents offer real hope to fans of the brand’s electric efforts. If scaled effectively, this could be the first truly mass-market electric motorcycle from a major OEM, with a sticker price likely far below the $5,000 mark usually seen as a floor for commuter electric motorcycles from major manufacturers. That would also dramatically undercut models from brands like Zero or Harley-Davidson’s LiveWire, even as those brands rush to bring their own lower-cost models to market.
Electrek’s Take
Honda’s patent reveals a clever, no-frills EV designed to democratize electric two-wheeling, especially in developing markets that are even more price-sensitive than Western electric motorcycle customers.
Using a trusted frame, simple electric drive, and passive cooling, I’d say it definitely prioritizes cost over complexity, which is exactly what urban commuters need. If Honda can bring this to market, it would not just add another electric bike to the mix… it could create a new baseline for affordability in affordable electric mobility. Now we’re just waiting for the rubber to hit the road!
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Tesla shareholders will vote on whether to invest into xAI, Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s private company, according to a post by Musk on twitter today.
Elon Musk is not just the CEO of Tesla, the electric car company that you may have heard about from time to time in Electrek’s coverage, but several other companies as well. And, famously, Musk companies often share resources – there has been much talk of incorporating SpaceX technology into Tesla vehicles, and putting xAI/twitter’s “MechaHitler”…. er, I mean, “Grok”…. feature into Tesla cars, among other collaborations that have happened over his various companies’ histories.
And today, Musk made it official that he will seek greater collaboration between three of his companies: Tesla, xAI, and twitter, in the form of an investment into xAI by Tesla.
The situation is a little more complicated than that, though.
Tesla is a public company, owned by shareholders. Musk is the largest shareholder, but only owns around 12% of the company himself.
This is a different situation than xAI, which is a private company, owned by Musk. While there are other investors, he can exercise much more direct control over the company, and doesn’t have to put big decisions up to a vote.
One of the recent decisions he made with xAI was to purchase twitter in March. You may say, “wait, I thought he bought twitter back in 2022?,” and you’d be correct. Musk purchased twitter for $44 billion in 2022, which was widely agreed to be far too high a price, and then rapidly saw the company’s valuation drop to under $10 billion.
Then, in March 2025, Musk had xAI purchase twitter in an all-stock deal, valuing twitter company at $45 billion – again, far too high of a valuation, but considering he purchased the company from himself, he could set the price at whatever he wanted.
The move was widely considered to be a bailout of twitter, and the numbers involved considered arbitrary, perhaps partially to help save face for Musk after he made one of the worst business deals of all time.
Now the two are the same entity, and it seems clear that he would like to bring Tesla into the fold, in some way or another.
Musk has already improperly used resources from Tesla, a public company, to boost xAI and twitter, his private companies. Last year, he gave up Tesla’s priority position for highly sought-after NVIDIA H100 GPUs, instead shipping those GPUs to xAI and twitter. Tesla could have used these GPUs for training its FSD/Robotaxi systems, which Musk has claimed is the most important thing to Tesla’s future, but instead graciously sent them to his other company that used them to, uh, train a bot to say Nazi stuff apparently.
xAI has also poached talent from Tesla, multiple times, showing how Musk is using Tesla as a farm team for his private company.
So it hasn’t been a secret that Musk would like to use public money to bail out his private companies, as he’s been setting the stage for for a while now.
Musk has previously “discussed” getting Tesla to invest in xAI in the past, but the idea was never made official until today, when Musk said that he will put the idea to a shareholder vote.
In response to one of his superfans asking for the the opportunity to waste money on an overvalued social media app (which would mark the third time it has been overpaid for in as many years), and the backend fueling “MechaHitler,” Musk said this:
Tesla traditionally holds its annual shareholder meeting around the middle of the year, so if it were a normal year, this shareholder vote might be imminent.
But it’s not a normal year, as just last week Tesla announced an exceptionally late shareholder meeting, pushing it back to November, the latest it has ever held the meeting.
This means that Musk will have around four months to campaign for this idea – something that he’ll perhaps have more time to do, now that he’s no longer cosplaying as a government official.
We don’t know what the structure of the deal might look like yet, but Musk has been clear in the past that he wants more shares in Tesla. After selling many of his shares in order to buy twitter, he later complained that he doesn’t feel comfortable having less than 25% of Tesla. Given that his recent xAI/twitter deal was an all-stock deal, Musk could attempt to fund any investment of Tesla into xAI via shares, giving himself more Tesla shares in exchange for the company gaining a portion of xAI. Though to get him to 25% voting shares in Tesla, that would require either an enormous valuation for xAI, a small valuation for Tesla, or purchasing a large percentage of xAI (or, perhaps, all three, given how much higher TSLA’s valuation is than xAI’s).
We may however have a hint as to how that vote will go, because the last time Musk campaigned for a clearly terrible idea, Tesla shareholders ate it up.
In mid-2024, Musk ended his yearslong absenteeism at Tesla in a flurry of activity, hoping to persuade enough shareholders to vote for his illegal $55B pay package.
That flurry involved firing 10% of the company (supposedly in order to save money – though Tesla’s earnings have dropped drastically since), including important leadership and successful teams, which caused chaos with Tesla’s projects. He also pushed back an all-important affordable car project (which we’ve still heard nothing about) and held Tesla’s AI projects hostage while shifting both resources and staff from Tesla to his private AI company, even as he claims that AI is the future of Tesla.
In the end, these bad decisions worked, and shareholders voted to give their bad CEO his $55B pay package, even though it was later ruled to still be illegal.
So it looks like we’ve got another campaign coming up, and if last time was any indication, expect some really bad decisions along the way. It worked last time, didn’t it?
Republicans recently killed a number of home energy efficiency credits, including the rooftop solar credit. That means you only have until the end of this year to upgrade your home before republicans raise the cost of doing so by an average of ~$10,000. So if you want to go solar, get started TODAY, because these things take time and the system needs to be active before you file for the credit.
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The off-highway equipment experts at Perkins and McElroy have teamed up to develop a plug-and-play battery electric power unit designed to help equipment OEMs and upfitters to seamlessly transition from diesel to battery electric power.
Designed to occupy the same space as the companies’ diesel-engined power units, Perkins dropped its new battery power unit into the similarly new McElroy TracStar 900i pipe fusion machine (specialized equipment used to join thermoplastic pipes like HDPE or polypropylene by heat-welding them end-to-end to form a continuous length pf pipe).
Perkins’ battery electric power unit replaces the company’s proprietary 134 hp, 3.6 liter 904 Series Tier V diesel engine, enabling units that are already deployed to be quickly upgraded to electric power – and helping trade allies and development partners to easily retrofit existing equipment in order to add zero-emission options to their operational fleet.
“We’re actively helping customers navigate the shift in power system requirements, with a range of advanced power systems including electric, diesel-electric and alternative fuel compatible engines,” says Jaz Gill, vice president, global sales, marketing at Perkins. “When it comes to the innovative fully integrated battery electric power unit, it can be ‘dropped in’ to a machine to replace a diesel engine. The system consists of a Perkins battery along with inverters, motors and on-board chargers – all packaged up into a compact drop-in system to support seamless transition from diesel to electric for our customers looking to make that move.”
McElroy believes that an electric, emissions-free power unit like this one will open new opportunities and applications for its customers.
“Their team has done a phenomenal job of integrating their battery electric system into our TracStar 900i,” explains McElroy President and CEO Chip McElroy. “We’re really excited to see what the market thinks about this concept.”
Development of the battery electric powered pipe fusion machine was completed in about nine months. Future Perkins-powered electric equipment running the 904 diesel (small excavators, telehandlers, pumps, and gensets) could be developed even more quickly. You can find out more in the company’s promo video, below.
Perkins electric power unit
SOURCE | IMAGES: McElroy, Perkins.
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