9AM Hour: PayPal Surges on M&A News, Buffett on Alphabet, BlackRock CEO Larry Fink Exclusive 7/15/26

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
The board recommends approving...

**David Solomon** (0:01)
Regarding that seat on the committee, we're promoting...

**SPEAKER_3** (0:02)
To boost quarterly earnings...

**SPEAKER_4** (0:04)
Every day, shareholders meet to discuss important matters about the companies you invest in. Now you can easily make your voice heard. Vanguard Investor Choice gives you a say in the companies you invest in. With just a few taps, you can set your proxy voting preference for your index funds. Visit vanguard.com/investorchoice to learn more. Vanguard Investors own shares of our index funds, which own shares of the companies they invest in. Available for Vanguard index funds that participate in Investor Choice. Vanguard Marketing Corporation Distributor.

**SPEAKER_1** (0:30)
How do you turn your strategy into action and action into impact? Bold leaders do it through transformative strategy and transactions. Ones that work in practice, not just on paper. At EY Parthenon, we use an investor mindset to help you create value. How?
By combining deep sector experience with AI-powered technology, so you can reimagine your business for tomorrow while building it today.
Shape your future with EY Parthenon. Learn more today.

**Jim Cramer** (1:00)
It's Jim Cramer here. You're listening to the opening bell of CNBC Squawk on the Street. Don't miss a minute of the action.

**Carl Quintanilla** (1:07)
Good Wednesday morning. Welcome to Squawk on the Street. I'm Carl Quintanilla with Jim Cramer, David Faber at Post 9 of the New York Stock Exchange. Second day in a row, the futures benefit from a cool inflation read. Today, it's PPI that falls three-tenths, biggest negative monthly read since COVID. Watching more bank earnings, ASML, Warsh and Senate banking. CENTCOM, meantime, does strike Iran in the daylight this time for 90 minutes this morning, trying to degrade Iran's ability to disrupt commercial shipping in the Strait, where nearly a dozen civilian sailors have been killed or missing or injured.
Our roadmap begins with Tech looking to maintain that upward momentum while IBM tries to rebound from that historic sell-off yesterday.

**David Faber** (1:46)
Also ahead, Morgan Stanley and BlackRock each out with quarterly results and both exceeded the estimates of analysts who followed those companies. BlackRock CEO Larry Fink is going to join us right here at Post9. We'll talk about everything from the investment climate to new milestones for that company. The Fed Chairman, Kevin Warsh, head into Capitol Hill. It's the second day of testimony, this time before the Senate Banking Committee. But we begin this morning with a little M&A, in fact, or at least news of potential deals involving PayPal, which has received an offer from a combination of the private equity firm, Advent, and the private company, Stripe, to the tune of $60.50 a share, all in cash to acquire it. This is reporting from Reuters that was dead on. It does seem perhaps that it was an organized leak in part to try to put pressure on a board of directors that will be meeting, I am told, as soon as July 20th to discuss this.
My understanding as well according to people familiar with the situation is that there have been talks, or at least offers being made and talks that have resulted between this group and PayPal for some period of time. Many months ago, in fact, this sort of started and there was some reporting back some time ago from the likes of Bloomberg, I believe, about Stripe's interest in PayPal. This is an interesting potential deal that would not involve Stripe merging with PayPal. It would be part of this buying group with Advent. They would be putting up $17 billion in equity is what people familiar with the proposed deal tell me. By the way, also including, don't want to make too much of this, but does include, I am told as well, some participation in the equity side as well from Jack Dorsey's Block.
And so you would have this buying group that would then take PayPal private and then try to run it better, improve the Venmo service, for example. A lot of opportunities there. Our viewers can see, of course, the stock where it's been over some period of time. This is not even its 52-week high, let alone, of course, the highs this company saw a number of years back before things slowed dramatically. One reason why Stripe might not want to do it in terms of taking it in, there might be some regulatory unclear, haven't really investigated that, but it's got a far higher top line growth rate than does PayPal. Certainly, that would slow it and perhaps upset some of the private investors in Stripe, of which most recently was valued at about 149 billion far in excess of PayPal. You do have a lot of debt that would be associated with said deal as well. Of course, bridge loans, a high-yield offering, preferreds, revolvers, everything that adds up to financing along with the equity to get you to $6.50.