PayPal announced the appointment of Enrique Lores as its new President and CEO, effective March 1, 2026. Lores has served on the PayPal Board for almost five years and as Board Chair since July 2024 and most recently led HP as President and CEO for six years. CFO Jamie Miller will step in this month as interim leader until Lores takes the role.
Why fire Alex Chriss?
The board wrote in its announcement:
“While some progress has been made in a number of areas over the last two years, the pace of change and execution was not in line with the Board's expectations.”
The board also pointed to slower growth of PayPal's legacy branded checkout as a reason for the dismissal.
Firing Alex Chriss was a mistake in my opinion.
“Oh no, our precious stock price wasn't incrementally growing.” Yeah, but it also leveled off during his tenure, unlike the 3 years prior when it fell off a cliff! That's got to be worth something, right? Did they expect an 18 month turnaround back to $300?
Can you give the guy a minute to first clean up the disaster he inherited and then execute his new vision? And no, “2 years and 4 months” isn't a long enough “minute” in my book. Especially when talking about a company that had innovationally been neglected for a decade prior.
Since September 2023, Chriss had:
- Launched a media network, positioning PayPal to leverage its decades of consumer and merchant data to enter the high-margin business of advertising. Didn't get a chance to see this through.
- Positioned PayPal to become the de facto digital wallet of agentic shopping via partnerships with OpenAI, Google, and Microsoft. Didn't get a chance to see this through.
- Became a merchant processor in Shopify Payments, rather than just a third-party checkout option, taking a slice of the pie from Stripe for the first time ever in Shopify's history. Didn't get a chance to see this through.
I could list more than that, but just wanted to highlight a few key verticals he put roots down in.
Meanwhile the board is like, “but payment-volume growth in branded checkout slowed to 1% during the recent quarter.”
No shit! Competitors have been coming to the table to eat PayPal's lunch for the past two decades in that space, and it's caught up with them. Why do you think Chriss was transitioning PayPal towards being the backbone of commerce instead of just a consumer-facing digital wallet?
In the words of Kanye West, “Can I finish? Can I finish?”
❌ Focusing on quarterly stock growth = shortsighted
✅ Positioning PayPal for the AI / Shopify / Google / Apple dominated commerce future = forward thinking
Jeff Bezos famously didn't care about Amazon's stock price and practically mocked investors who did. Companies that are so ultra-focused on quarterly growth lack the vision that's needed to compete in this industry during the next two decades.
Replace the BOARD, not the CEO!
This isn't to say that Enrique Lores can't / won't do a good job running PayPal. My commentary above is about my optimism for Chriss's leadership, not my lack of faith in Lores's. I'm just disappointed in PayPal for not letting Chriss see it through, as is the market apparently.
PayPal needed a decade-CEO, not a quarterly-CEO, and they had one.
What are your thoughts? Join the conversation on LinkedIn.
