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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.

Watch CNBC's full interview with PayPal CEO Alex Chriss

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 new competitor has created 'turmoil in the industry': Wolfe Research

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

PayPal's crypto lead on allowing merchants to buy and sell virtual assets

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EVs and batteries power China’s $20B clean tech export surge

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EVs and batteries power China’s B clean tech export surge

China set a new record for clean tech exports in August 2025, hitting $20 billion, according to new data analyzed using Ember’s China Cleantech Exports Data Explorer. The country remains the world’s largest exporter of electrotech, with surging demand for EVs and batteries leading the charge.

EV exports jumped 26% from January through August compared to the same period in 2024, while battery exports rose 23%. Other sectors saw more modest growth – grid technology up 22%, wind up 16%, and heating and cooling systems up 4% – but those gains were offset by a 19% drop in solar PV export value. EVs and batteries are now worth more than double the value of China’s solar PV exports.

This milestone is remarkable because it comes even as technology prices have fallen sharply. Solar panel prices, for example, have plunged more than 80% over the past decade, making them more affordable and driving up global demand. In August alone, China exported 46 gigawatts (GW) of solar PV – more than Australia’s entire installed solar capacity – setting a record in capacity terms. However, their dollar value remains 47% below their March 2023 peak.

Falling prices have fueled growth in new regions. Over half of the increase in China’s EV exports this year came from outside the OECD, with the ASEAN region emerging as a major growth engine. EV exports to ASEAN surged 75% in the first eight months of 2025, mainly driven by Indonesia. The country saw the biggest rise in Chinese EV imports globally this year, becoming the world’s ninth-largest EV market. Battery electric vehicles made up 14% of new car sales in Indonesia in August 2025, up from 9% a year earlier.

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Africa is also rapidly adopting Chinese clean tech. From January to August, EV exports to the continent nearly tripled year-over-year (+287%), albeit from a very low base, with Morocco leading growth and Nigeria’s imports soaring sixfold. Latin America and the Caribbean saw an 11% rise, while the Middle East climbed 72%.

Domestically, China’s own adoption of clean tech is accelerating even faster. EVs accounted for 52% of new car sales in August, and in the first half of 2025, China installed more than twice as many solar panels as the rest of the world combined. Ember’s recent China Energy Transition Review attributes this momentum to consistent policy support that’s reshaping the country’s economy and energy system around electrified technologies.

“Demand for clean technologies continues to skyrocket as more and more countries seek their benefits, from low-cost power to cheaper vehicles,” said Ember analyst Euan Graham. “China’s electrotech is becoming the basis of the new energy system, with continued cost reductions driving faster growth than ever, especially in emerging economies.”

Read more: The era of cheap Chinese solar + storage is ending – here’s why


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This Meta alum has spent 10 months leading OpenAI’s nationwide hunt for its Stargate data centers

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This Meta alum has spent 10 months leading OpenAI's nationwide hunt for its Stargate data centers

Keith Heyde stands on site in Abilene, Texas, where OpenAI’s Stargate infrastructure buildout is underway. Heyde, a former head of AI compute at Meta, is now leading OpenAI’s physical expansion push.

OpenAI

It wasn’t how Keith Heyde envisioned celebrating the holidays. Rather than hanging out with his wife back home in Oregon, Heyde spent late December visiting potential data center sites across the U.S.

Two months earlier, Heyde left Meta to join OpenAI as the head of infrastructure. His job was to turn CEO Sam Altman’s ambitious compute dreams into reality, seeking out vast swaths of land suitable for expansive facilities that will eventually be packed with powerful graphics processing units for building large language models.

“My in-between Christmas and New Year’s last year was actually mostly spent looking at sites,” Heyde, 36, told CNBC in an interview. “So my family loved that, trust me.”

His life in 2025 has only gotten more intense.

Since January, OpenAI has been quietly soliciting and reviewing proposals from around 800 applicants hoping to host the next wave of its Stargate data centers, AI supercomputing hubs designed to train increasingly powerful models.

Roughly 20 sites are now in advanced stages of diligence, with massive tracts of land under review across the Southwest, Midwest and Southeast. Heyde said tax incentives are “a relatively small part of the decision matrix.”

The most important factors are access to power, ability to scale, and buy-in from local communities.

“Can we build quickly, is the power ramp there fast, and is this something where it makes sense from a community perspective?” he said.

Heyde leads site development within OpenAI’s industrial compute team, a division that’s swiftly become one of the most important groups inside the company. Infrastructure, once a supporting function, has now been elevated to a strategic pillar on par with product and model development.

With traditional data centers nearly at max capacity, OpenAI is betting that owning the next generation of physical infrastructure is central to controlling the future of AI.

Inside OpenAI's data center site search

The energy needs are hard to fathom. A gigawatt data center requires the amount of power needed for some entire cities. Late last month, OpenAI announced plans for a 17-gigawatt buildout in partnership with OracleNvidia, and SoftBank.

New sites will have to include all sorts of energy options, including battery-backed solar installations, legacy gas turbine refurbishments and even small modular nuclear reactors, Heyde said. Each site looks different, but together they form the industrial backbone OpenAI needs to scale.

“We’ve done this wonderful piece of bottleneck analysis to see what types of energy sources actually allow us to unlock the journey that we want to be on,” Heyde said.

A good chunk of the capital is coming from Nvidia. The chipmaker agreed to invest up to $100 billion to fuel OpenAI’s expansion, which will involve purchasing millions of Nvidia’s GPUs.

‘Perfect wasn’t the goal’

Heyde, a former head of AI compute at Meta, helped oversee the buildout of Meta’s first 100,000 GPU cluster.

In addition to power, OpenAI is assessing how quickly it can build on a site, the availability of labor and proximity to supportive local governments, according to Stargate’s request for proposal.

Heyde said the team has made around 100 site visits and has a short list of sites in late-stage review. Some will be brand new builds, and others will require conversions and refurbishments of existing facilities. Flexibility will be key.

“The perfect parcels are largely taken,” Heyde said. “But we knew that perfect wasn’t the goal — the goal for us was, number one, a compelling power ramp.”

Competition is fierce.

Meta is building what may be the largest data center in the Western Hemisphere — a $10 billion project in Northeast Louisiana, fueled by billions in state incentives. CEO Mark Zuckerberg raised the top end of the company’s annual capital expenditure spending range to $72 billion in July.

The steel frame of data centers under construction during a tour of the OpenAI data center in Abilene, Texas, U.S., Sept. 23, 2025.

Shelby Tauber | Reuters

Amazon and Anthropic are teaming up on a 1,200-acre AI campus in Indiana. And across the country, states are rolling out tax breaks, power guarantees, and expedited zoning approvals to attract the next big AI cluster.

OpenAI is a relative upstart, having been around for just a decade and only known to the mainstream since launching ChatGPT less than three years ago. But it’s raised mounds of cash from the likes of Microsoft and SoftBank, in addition to Nvidia, on its way to a $500 billion valuation.

And OpenAI is showing it’s not afraid to lead the way in AI. A self-built solar campus in Abiliene, Texas, is already live.

While OpenAI still leans on partners like Oracle, OpenAI Chief Financial Officer Sarah Friar told CNBC last week in Abilene that owning first-party infrastructure provides a differentiated approach. It curbs vendor markups, safeguards key intellectual property, and follows the same strategic logic that once drove Amazon to build Amazon Web Services rather than rely on existing infrastructure.

However, Heyde indicated that there’s no real playbook when it comes to AI, particularly as companies pursue artificial general intelligence (AGI), or AI that can potentially meet or exceed human capabilities.

OpenAI's stealth site search drew more than 800 bids since January 2025

“It’s a very different order of magnitude when we think about the type of delivery that has to happen at those locations,” he said.

Some applicants, including former bitcoin mining operators, offered existing power infrastructure, like substations and modular buildouts, but Heyde said those don’t always fit.

“Sometimes we found that it’s almost nice to be the first interaction in a community,” he said. “It’s a very nice narrative that we’re bringing the data center and the infrastructure there on behalf of OpenAI.”

The 20 finalist sites represent phase one of a much larger buildout. OpenAI ultimately plans to scale from single-gigawatt projects to massive campuses.

“Any place or any site we’re moving forward with, we’ve really considered the viability and our own belief that we can deliver the power story and the infrastructure story associated with those sites,” Heyde said.

He understands why many people are skeptical.

“It’s hard. There’s no doubt about it,” Heyde said. “The numbers we’re talking about are very challenging, but it’s certainly possible.”

WATCH: OpenAI’s $850 billion buildout contends with grid limits

OpenAI’s $850 billion buildout contends with grid limits

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Cadillac’s quiet coup: nearly HALF of all Caddies sold in Q3 were electric

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Cadillac's quiet coup: nearly HALF of all Caddies sold in Q3 were electric

There’s a quiet revolution underway in Cadillac showrooms across America. The brand’s renewed “Standard of the World” ambitions are now matched by sleek, statement-making electric vehicles. And, thanks to a little help from Federal tax credit FOMO, more than 40% of new Cadillacs sold in Q3 were 100% electric.

GM’s overall EV sales numbers were up 110% last quarter, climbing to 66,501 units in the US alone on the back of the affordable, 300+ mile Chevy Equinox and 1,000-mile capable (sort of) Silverado EV – but it was Cadillac dealers that saw the biggest growth in EV sales.

As buyers poured into Cadillac dealerships in the last days of the $7,500 Federal EV tax credit, GM’s luxury arm was ready with stylish, new-for-2025 electric vehicles like the Optiq, Vistiq, and Escalade IQ* waiting for them alongside the Lyriq. The result wasn’t just Cadillac’s best third quarter in more than a decade – Cadillac (and GM) is having one of its best sales year, period.

Here’s what the quarter looked like, by the recently-released GM sales numbers.

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EV MODEL   Q3 25/Q3 24   Q3 25 Q3 24  YTD 25/YTD 24   YTD 25 YTD 24
Chevrolet Equinox EV +156.70% 25,085 9,772 +389.88% 52,834 10,785
Chevrolet Blazer EV +1.14% 8,089 7,998 +36.72% 20,825 15,232
Chevrolet Silverado EV +97.49% 3,940 1,995 +78.58% 9,379 5,252
Chevrolet BrightDrop * 2,384 * * 3,976 0
GMC Hummer EV Pickup +21.86% 5,246 4,305 +48.65% 13,233 8,902
GMC Sierra EV +771.84% 3,374 387 +1,488.37% 6,147 387
Cadillac Optiq * 4,886 * * 9,826 0
Cadillac Lyriq +1.18% 7,309 7,224 -18.17% 16,626 20,318
Cadillac Vistiq * 3,924 * * 5,669 0
Cadillac Escalade IQ * 2,264 * * 6,030 0
Total +109.91% 66,501 31,681 +137.44% 144,545 60,876

Source: GM Authority / GM Q3 2025 sales report.

That asterisk up there next to the high-rolling Escalade IQ that sold more than 3,900 examples is because, at well over $80,000 even for the most basic model it never qualified for the $7,500 Federal EV tax credit to begin with (nor did the people destined to buy it, who almost certainly make too much to qualify).

It’ll be interesting to see if the loss of that tax credit will do much to negatively impact EV sales in Q4. And that’ll get doubly interesting thanks to the creative accounting team at GM that figured out how to extend that $7,500 tax credit for existing dealer inventory (for a few more months) and that its biggest EV rivals at Hyundai are slashing prices on popular IONIQ models.

You can check out our EIC Fred Lambert’s full review of the new electric Cadillac Escalade in the video, below, and use the following links to find great Cadillac deals near you while that cleverly extended tax credit is still a thing.

Cadillac Escalade IQ review


SOURCE | IMAGES: GM, via GM Authority.


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