PayPal wants Pinterest. And it would be ready to put a staggering figure on the table: 39 billion dollars. The news beat Bloomberg News and caused the share price of the photo social network to rise quickly. The stock of Pinterest in fact immediately jumped to + 13% on Wall Street, only to be stopped – once it fell to + 9.4% – due to excess volatility.
According to Bloomberg, PayPal Holdings – a company based in San Jose, California, which has always been involved in technology applied to finance – would be considering the possibility of buying Pinterest for a price of about $ 70 per share. If the figures were confirmed, this transaction would be $ 39 billion, immediately ranking first among the most expensive acquisitions in the history of the technology industry.
The numbers of Pinterest
Pinterest, according to Statista, has 454 million active users. A certainly low number when compared to giants such as Facebook, Instagram and TikTok, but at the same time considerable in the world of social networks. It is a platform based – a bit like Instagram – on photographs. And it is a very important mine, for example, for tattoo enthusiasts. It was launched in January 2010 and the name derives from the union of the English words pin (pin, pin) and interest (interest). The founders are Evan Sharp, Ben Silbermann and Paul Sciarra. And in the first years of its life, the boom in users was so significant that it led everyone to believe that Pinterest could be the real competitor of Facebook. Instead the hype quickly deflated. Nevertheless, Pinterest has not disappeared, it has grown slowly and today is in danger of being the subject of a billionaire acquisition.
Very high figure
The figure, it must be said, seems really high. Also due to the fact that Microsoft, a few years ago, bought LinkedIn for 26 billion dollars. And Facebook took Instagram for 1 billion and WhatsaApp for 19. In addition, when – about a year ago – there was the famous negotiation between ByteDance and Microsoft for the sale of TikTok, the dancing figures were between 30 and 50 billions. And TikTok is the social network with the highest growth rate in the world. PayPal, which has always been synonymous with electronic payments, could use Pinterest to set up an ecommerce, or something like that. And it would be a historic step for the company co-founded by Elon Musk about twenty years ago.