Welcome to Markets Desk, here's what's moving the needle this afternoon.
PayPal is still trading below the sixty dollar and fifty cent per share bid that its own board rejected from Stripe and Advent International, a combined offer worth fifty-three billion dollars. That spread tells you the market is skeptical a deal gets done, and that skepticism is well-founded when a board walks away from a premium and the stock can't close the gap.
Shifting to power, the AI infrastructure buildout keeps generating headlines measured in gigawatts, but as Forbes notes today, there's a critical difference between announced capacity and delivered capacity. Permits, contracts, and actual grid connections are four separate milestones, and right now the industry is heavy on announcements and light on the latter three. Investors pricing in data center growth should keep that gap in mind.
And on the consumer side, E.l.f. Beauty beat Street estimates and is doing something unusual with the tariff relief it captured — reinvesting it directly into international expansion rather than returning it to shareholders. That's a growth signal, not a margin story, and it suggests management sees runway abroad that justifies deploying the windfall now rather than banking it.
That's the tape. Markets Desk, signing off the floor.
