PayPal’s board recently undertook a bold interception of the downward slide in the company’s performance, appointing a new CEO, Enrique Lores, who will hopefully bring clarity of priorities and organizational alignment to complete initiatives and execute a turnaround.
I applaud this decision: PayPal’s board is thinking like owners, getting ahead of investors before trust is lost and activists arrive to catalyze change.
PayPal went public in 2002 and has been independent from eBay since 2015. Over the last five years, it has experienced an approximately 86% decline in share price, while Stripe, Adyen, Block, and Square have boomed.
There is still a lot to play for here. PayPal is ranked 137 on the S&P 500 and it is in a strong market. The real-time payment transactions space grew to approximately $38.6 billion in 2025, with a 43% CAGR forecast from 2026–2030 and long-term projections of 3x volume growth between now and 2030.
The average Fortune 500 CEO tenure has dropped from 7.7 years in 2024 to 6.8 years in the first half of 2025. Shorter-tenured CEOs are significantly more impacted by negative quarterly performance, increasing the likelihood of termination by 34%, according to studies.
