I doubt that Stripe and Braintree will be interested in employees in the bottom 3% of PayPal.

What makes you think only the bottom 3% get shown the door in during lay offs?

In fact from my experience, the guys with most political contacts inside the companies generally get the most security.

Exactly. When shit hits the fan, expensive contractors go first. Then the executives that lost to other executives.

Low wage workers rarely get cut first.

Indeed. Given how stagnant Paypal seems to be (at least from the outside), I suspect that many of the good employees interested in the problem space left for greener pastures a while ago.

It would nonetheless be an easy way to get some valuable knowledge from the internals of paypal.

I wouldn't be surprised if these are good employees in a bad BU. Specifically PayPal seems to have abandoned online payments for POS/B&M (which is exponentially larger - think Stripe's size vs Square) Thus why I imagined (guessed) who might be excited to get the talent.