In February we published PayPal's CEO firing and the 31% crash around it. The open question it left was whether the next chief executive could restart growth in the core checkout business, or whether the problem was structural.
Two quarters have printed since. We covered the more recent one in July, in detail, and the piece does not contain the new CEO's name.
He is Enrique Lores, formerly chief executive of HP, and he succeeded Alex Chriss on March 1, 2026 — recorded in our stored PayPal data. When this piece was drafted, that data's key-players record still labelled him "CEO (incoming)" and said he "will become CEO March 2026" — an entry written before he started and not updated since; we corrected it alongside this piece, and it now reads "CEO since March 2026."
The handover, quarter by quarter
| quarter ended | revenue | free cash flow | FCF margin | diluted EPS |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2025-12-31 — last full quarter before | $8,676M | $2,190M | 25.2% | $1.54 |
| 2026-03-31 — he starts on day 60 of it | $8,353M | $903M | 10.8% | $1.21 |
Free cash flow fell 59% and the margin more than halved. It would be easy to write that as the handover quarter going badly, and it would be wrong.
PayPal's cash generation is violently seasonal, and the same step appears a year earlier under the previous management. The December quarter to the March quarter:
| Q4 | Q1 | change | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2024 → 2025 | 26.2% | 12.4% | −13.8 points |
| 2025 → 2026 | 25.2% | 10.8% | −14.4 points |
Two nearly identical collapses, one under each CEO. Read sequentially, the handover quarter looks like a rupture; read against the same quarter a year earlier, the margin went from 12.4% to 10.8% — a real decline of about a point and a half, not a halving.
Revenue over the same comparison rose from $7,791M to $8,353M, +7.21% year over year. Our nine-point series supports five year-over-year comparisons, and this is the second-fastest of them — a hair behind the quarter ended 2025-09-30, at +7.26%, which was Chriss's. The two fastest growth quarters PayPal has printed in our data are five basis points apart and sit on either side of the handover, which is the same thing the cash-flow table says: the trajectory did not change when the chair did.
The quarter our data does not have
PayPal has reported once more since. That quarter is not in our stored PayPal data — the series stops at 2026-03-31 — so nothing here is computed from it. What this site published at the time, from the release: revenue of $8,682M, up 4.8% year over year, with the take rate down 7 basis points to 1.61% and Branded Checkout volume growing about 2% for a second straight quarter.
That piece called the checkout number "stabilization, not acceleration." Against February's open question — restart growth, or structural — two quarters in, the honest answer from our own coverage is neither yet: the bleeding stopped and the growth did not start.
On the buyback
A repurchase programme is the obvious thing to look for in a cash-rich transition, and it is the one claim here we cannot check. This site stores revenue, free cash flow, EPS, gross margin and P/E for PayPal — there is no buyback, share-count-over-time or capital-return series in the file, and the share counts it does carry are point-in-time rather than historical. So we are not going to tell you what PayPal bought back under the new CEO, because nothing in this repository knows.
What to watch
The December quarter, not the next one. On the seasonal pattern above, PayPal's cash quarter is Q4, and it is the first one Lores will have run end to end. A Q4 free-cash-flow margin near 25% would say the seasonal engine is intact; materially below would be the first genuine signal in this series that something changed with the management.
Take rate against volume. The July piece's 1.61% is the number that decides whether the core is stabilising or slowly eroding, and it is independent of who is in the chair.
And a smaller one for us: the series that stops at March is why this piece could not simply compute his second quarter. That gap is something we counted across the site yesterday — PayPal is one of fourteen tickers whose stored data ends before the quarter we have already written about.
Revenue, free cash flow and diluted EPS are from our stored PayPal revenue, free-cash-flow and EPS series, which end at the quarter ended 2026-03-31; FCF margins are those two series divided, and the year-over-year comparisons use the same quarter four points earlier in the same file. The chief executive, his predecessor and the March 1, 2026 succession date are from that data's key-players record and narrative — this site holds no external source for them, and the block's "incoming" label, an artefact of its own, was corrected alongside this piece. Q2 2026 figures are quoted from our July analysis of that release and are not recomputed here, because the series does not hold that quarter. No price, market-capitalisation or share-move figure appears above.