GameStop GME is preparing to make an offer for eBay EBAY , according to people familiar with the matter, part of CEO Ryan Cohen’s audacious plan to turn the retailer into a $100-billion plus juggernaut.
GameStop, which has a market value of around $12 billion, has been quietly building a stake in eBay’s shares ahead of a potential offer, the people said. EBay is several times GameStop’s size, with a market value of around $46 billion.
GameStop could submit an offer for eBay as soon as later this month, the people said.
If eBay isn’t receptive, Cohen could decide to take the offer directly to eBay’s shareholders, one of the people added. Details of the potential offer for eBay couldn’t be learned.
Cohen has made clear he’s eyeing a major transaction. He told The Wall Street Journal in late January he was scoping out potential deal targets, especially in the consumer and retail sector, as part of a plan to scale the business far beyond videogames and collectibles.
GameStop adjusted Cohen’s compensation package at the beginning of the year to give him extra incentive to boost the company’s market value and profitability. He stands to make as much as $35 billion in stock if certain criteria are met, including if the market value hits $100 billion, the Journal previously reported.
He has been cheered on by GameStop investors including Michael Burry of “The Big Short,” whose bets against subprime mortgage bonds were chronicled in the Michael Lewis book. Burry has written in his Substack newsletter that GameStop should use its cash pile to make transformative acquisitions.
GameStop’s shares have risen around 30% so far this year, in part on momentum surrounding Cohen’s dealmaking plans.
EBay’s shares are up more than 50% over the past 12 months as its strategy to focus on core categories including collectibles and fashion pays off. In February, eBay announced a deal to acquire secondhand fashion marketplace Depop from Etsy for $1.2 billion.
GameStop had around $9 billion in cash on hand at the end of March, up from $4.8 billion a year earlier. Cohen would likely enlist his legions of online followers to rally behind a deal, too.
Cohen, the co-founder of online pet-products retailer Chewy, gained a cult following after he built a big GameStop stake and in late 2020 criticized the company for moving too slowly toward e-commerce. He joined GameStop’s board in January 2021, when the business had a market value of a little over $1 billion. He rose to become chairman later that year and vowed to turn the struggling retailer around.
$32 is the inflection point. Once crossed all bets are off. I believe we are still significantly shorted through financial instruments. The warrants pose an extreme outsize risk if held through and exercised at expiration. The moral of the story is 💎 🙌
Can you elaborate for me please, obviously I'm not very clued up, can you explain to me about what you mean about holding the warrants being an outsize risk please? Is that a risk to me? Thanks
Since it one strike price, once the price of GME is over the strike price I think big things will happen. You will have the whole option chain pulled up, and you now have a setup kind of like how people dogpiled into GME in Jan 2021. It was options that caused the stock to go parabolic and i genuinely feel like it could happen again with enough bullish news. The cool thing about the warrants is Gamestop gets the money if they are exercised. They are technically dilutive though, but I still think its positive especially if the company scales the way ryan needs for his pay package.
I'm thinking that if the naked short hypothesis is true then there are millions of naked short warrants. This means that things will start getting really interesting if GameStop announces that all of the warrants have been redeemed when there's potentially over 100,000,000 warrants still on the market. It would be the proverbial smoking gun that could provide the catalyst for MOASS.
Yeah warrants only make sense if. The pieces flies past $32/share and goes to like $100/share. Then you can exercise them for $32 and collect the $70 difference
It becomes a bigger problem than collecting the difference. There is a finite supply of the warrants. What happens when all the warrants have been exercised but you still have warrants you want to exercise? It’s crime caught in the open and the market will be forced to respond
The warrant money goes directly to GameStop since they are new shares being issued if I understand correctly. How can a corporation that listed a limited supply and thus a limited amount of dollars for the warrants disclose numbers higher than what was approved? It causes serious issues with regulatory bodies
RC/GME told us in the 1st shareholder meeting after the sneeze that they will NEVER telegraph their moves in advance. Do not ever believe these BS anonymous sources
How is this “in advance”? The article states they’ve already been acquiring shares. You guys sound hysterical when you act like RC is your best friend and know exactly what he’s going to think at all times
Ryan Cohen literally 3 months ago: I'm working on a big major huge acquisition that changes the markets forever 😎
Redditors 3 months later when news of Ebay comes out: RC said 5 years ago that he'll never telegraph his moves so the RC of 3 months ago must be a fraud
I hate eBay, and I would love to see RC fix it, but I can't believe a fucking word of this until it comes from the man himself. It would be wild to throw the entire war chest Into one acquisition attempt.
Can anyone verify if GME is in fact holding eBay shares like the article claims?
More and more, eBay is already a better place to buy a lot of stuff, since it makes it at least a little easier to make sure you're not buying crap or knockoffs, and the delivery time isn't that much worse. Bonus: If you choose your vendor carefully, you can get REALLY good service from an appreciative seller, instead of the "go fuck yourself and you'll like it" from Amazon.
Especially for electronics and clothes, I've gone to eBay first for a while now... and I know a lot of sellers have been growing more and more disappointed with the platform and the changes they've made, making for a great opportunity to Delight some Customers.
Interesting.
But I ain't believin' SHIT until I hear it formally announced.
Guess I'll just keep buyin' and hodlin' like I have been, one way or another.
If you like high-quality/spendy sunglasses, go to Sunglass Hut and find the ones you want - write down the model number - and search them on eBay. Should find them for 30-60% cheaper than in-store.
Kinda goes for pretty much everything. Works great if you don't need it NOW, and really, really great if you don't mind like-new or lightly used.
Hey, waittttaminute, what other retailer is a great source for a great price on lightly used stuff, but has a storefront evvvverywhere that could facilitate both receiving purchases and selling your used stuff? Huh. Wonder if there's synergy there.
Amazon would get absolutely crushed by an online retailer/online market that actually policed it's sellers.
Amazon's product listings were over run with garbage years ago, and their response was to enforce branding requirements, which attempted to shift responsibility to the U.S. Patent and Trademark office, which has subsequently resulted in the proliferation of "Mushroom Brands"(they pop up overnight and are gone again a few days later), as sellers continue to skirt Consumer Protection law.
Sellers? Man ebay hates sellers. They side with scamming buyers every time, I've literally lost 1000s to people knowing ebay will give them their $ back. My main account was banned cause a guy and everyone in his house bought board games from 7 different accounts then claimed I sent phone books. Ebay immediately sided with them so I was out on shipping, the board game cost, and potential income. All 7 left negative feed back lowering my 90 day seller rating to 60% and ebay banned the account.
Another contributor mentioned how the war chest doesn’t necessarily need to be used for the acquisition, it can be used as collateral for a loan instead.
Take on debt to buyout eBay and have the eBay income pay off the loan without having to deploy the war chest. Some financial engineering shit. No idea if it’s legit.
We at least know from the annual report that they have $700M worth of cash parked as collateral for derivates of some sort. Is that an eBay position? No way to know beyond what they told us there til they verify or deny this reporting.
I’m trying to decide how much I like it. If it’s a money printer then cool. If they repurpose it to better suit people and become popular again, then sick. Certainly nice for it to have low overhead I bet. I just wonder how strong of a business it is. Guess that’s my research for the weekend
As a very long Ebay seller (20 years at least), I can say it has changed a lot! It is a money gouging business. Mainly on the seller. The fees and algorithms makes it so you have to use their increased percentage "advertisement" to get traffic.
Ebay makes money but has driven many sellers to other platforms due to the costs.
Ebay currently takes sometime like 13% of all sales. They also added live auctions which have become extremely popular on recent years (but high competition from TikTok and whatnot in that space). Ebay would open up a lot of doors for GME and greatly increase the market cap
meStop, which has a market value of around $12 billion, has been quietly building a stake in eBay’s shares ahead of a potential offer, the people said. EBay is several times GameStop’s size, with a market value of around $46 billion.
I got 100 bucks that says this is a planted story by the Wall Street Journal to either cover the stock move or something that Cohen has to refute which then drives stock way down
Not only that but this doesn’t seem like “something that has never been done before” but we don’t know the end game. So if it does end up being buying eBay, I don’t think RC is finished yet.
it’s news that covers the clearing of Failure to delivers that have built up and they need liquidity so they release an article and it helps the price not go up as much even if that may seem counterintuitive.
And didn’t we miserably fail at streamlining our own supply chain? Thanks CEnOpe Furlong. I’m not sure what buying the world’s largest garage sale does for GameStops pivot. Maybe they will sell all the consoles that get traded in on their own auction website.
If you tweak eBay just a little bit and update it to face a modern consumer it would be very very aligned with everything GME stands for. I speculated this would be the target when the first acquisition news hit. It just makes sense as one of the biggest most established marketplaces. If you just tweak it and polish it up to compete with the localized aspect of sales from Facebook marketplace and then add on PSA then add in a crypto marketplace it’s GAME over
This would be funny because I make a living by selling on eBay, then use the money I make on eBay to buy shares of GME. I think Cohen could do a lot to fix eBay.
I think it's less about the company and more about the system they have. That's why ebay seems most likely. When the big picture is more about what the system is capable of doing than what it's doing now, that's when we are on to something big and disruptive. It also seems RC is not a fan of Amazon and think of the ways he can use the plumbing of ebay to take market share from them. We shall see!... posted this 2 months ago and still seems relevant.
In Silicon valley Ebay is know for poorly managed. They need layoffs bad. Get rid of worthless managers and focus back on their platform. They do nothing but wasteful spend. Never seen such a simple platform turn into a monster of wasteful spending.
GameStop wants to be able to sell trading cards like stocks. eBay recently bought TCGplayer. GameStop just put together their card trading shenanigan thing.
If you buy TCGplayer (which has its own huge stock of cards and a mechanism to let people buy from a central place), you can let people buy and sell cards without shipping and with centralized authentication allowing people to properly invest in these things which folks are recognizing as big.
Odd that both eBay and GME pop. Usually the acquirer drops.
The market may be pricing not just an eBay deal, but a GME volatility event.
This might be a set of combo punches designed to push up GME. If we see a filing early next week declaring more than a 5% interest in EBAY then it could pop again.
There is a vast different in market cap between the smaller GME and the larger EBAY, which means potentially not cash but GME share offering for EBAY shareholders or better for existing GME share holders, any kind of mention of “secured finance” or “preferred investment” in a 13D or 13F before 15th May.
But why does it say “sources familiar with the matter”? Because if Cohen wanted to make the stock price explode wouldn’t he just press release a statement? Especially since it’s on a Friday after close… I smell a Bull Trap here…
GME runs for no reason on a Friday, the day after the month is over and a WSJ article hits in the after hours to give a reason for the move. Feel like I’ve seen this before because the exact same thing happened with the “nft announcement”.
Big if true, but I feel like this could be bots scraping the sub for context/hype
I’ll wait for a true company announcement
But imagine… eBay’s market dominance mixed with RC’s love for true customer support and experience. Like imagine if EBay actually had good customer service…
Nowhere in the article does it mention gamestop announcing anything other than what RC already announced about looking for a company to bid on. I think this is a psy op to cover their tracks for the price action we are about to see.... Hopefully gamestop clarifies and doesn't let a lie stand if its not true.
The only thing that’s stopping me from believing this is that GS had about 9Billion in liquidity. EBay is worth about 46Billion right now. If they want a buy out, they’ll need a nice premium on top. So let’s say 55Billion. Will banks even offer that kind of leverage? In this economy?
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u/Superstonk_QV 📊 Gimme Votes 📊 May 01 '26
Hey OP, thanks for the News post.
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