Fintech giant PayPal is reportedly in talks to acquire social media site Pinterest. The deal could value Pinterest at $39 billion.
The news sent shares of Pinterest ($PINS) soaring 12.7% today. 🚀 🚀 The company was valued at over $40 billion at the close.
PayPal’s interest in the image-sharing service supposedly has a lot to do with e-commerce on social media, a space which Instagram famously (and controversially) explored last year when the platform replaced our Instagram feed with a Shop that nobody asked for. 😒
The burgeoning space of “social commerce” has become a hot spot for other companies, too. Twitter’s CFO indicated that e-commerce was becoming increasingly important to the platform. A CNBC article on the reported deal indicated that Shopify and Affirm also presented a threat to PayPal’s business.
The Pinterest deal isn’t a done-deal quite yet, but considering PayPal’s desire to build a “super app,” these talks look pretty credible. PayPal sits in a busy corner of fintech — payment processing. Given Square, Stripe, and Affirm’s reach with point-of-sale, pay-as-you-go, and digital payments, PayPal might write this check to safeguard a new corner of the market. 🙌
$PYPL, which also owns Venmo and Honey, fell 4.9% today on the news.