Who Wants to Run a Humbler PayPal?

○ The payments giant has shed $279 billion in market value and is hunting for a new CEO

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The whispers kept getting louder: PayPal Holdings Inc.’s chief executive officer might leave.

It was late last year, and shareholders were counting on Dan Schulman to pull the stock out of a slide that’s now erased $279 billion in market value since its high point in 2021. But after he flew to Italy for his four-day wedding celebration on the banks of Lake Como, Silicon Valley and Wall Street began buzzing with the notion that PayPal’s longtime leader was ready for a change.

At the end of October, Chairman John Donahoe felt compelled to bat back the speculation: “The board has never discussed replacing Dan,” he said in a statement to Bloomberg News. A few months later, Schulman himself announced his plans to leave.

So goes the humbling of PayPal—once worth more than Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Citigroup Inc. combined. After strategy missteps that risk squandering its leading position in the lucrative online payments business, the company is starting from scratch on a CEO search. And it faces a pivotal question: What kind of boss should take over—a cost-cutter or another manager with an ambitious vision for growth?

Schulman himself was a replacement for a group of legendary founders and early executives— the so-called PayPal mafia that included billionaires-to-be Elon Musk and Peter Thiel, as well as tech luminaries Reid Hoffman and David Sacks. He made his own mark building the company to a peak market value of $362 billion as he floated the possibility of more than doubling clients to 1  billion. In 2021 he signaled a slew of products challenging US banks. But PayPal’s share price melted amid a slowdown in growth, a bungled attempt to buy Pinterest Inc. and the abandonment of some key targets.