Reporting from the Wall Street Journal indicates that GameStop, a company whose brick-and-mortar game-sale business model was rapidly going the way of the dodo but was granted a new lease on life thanks to being the poster child of the memestock craze, is looking to acquire eBay—a company four times larger than itself.
Per Reuters, which recapitulated the WSJ’s reporting, Ryan Cohen’s nerd-fueled juggernaut “has been quietly building a stake in eBay’s shares ahead of a potential offer,” but no specific offer has materialized yet, and none is expected over the following few weeks.
It’s rare to see a company trying to buy out another one several times its size, and if such a deal were to come to pass, it would involve a lot of financial engineering with loans and stocks to get it over the line.
The big question, of course, is why. It might seem out of pocket to attempt an acquisition like this, but from the perspective of GameStop, whose retail game-selling strategy is becoming less and less relevant with every passing year, and CEO Ryan Cohen has already signaled his intentions to pivot the company towards trading cards and various collectibles in the future, as they already make for a non-insignificant part of its revenues—which would actually make eBay, a key player in the second-hand trading market, a valuable expenditure. Its auction subsidiary, Goldin, was where Logan Paul sold the “holy grail of Pokémon cards” this February for almost $16.5 million.
Then again, this all depends on whether the project has any legs at all, and it is not at all guaranteed considering that Cohen has a history of vaporware projects and outright failures as part of his role at GameStop. Be it the 2022 NFT marketplace or the whole “Amazon for gaming” idea around the same time. In another sign of perfect business timing, GameStop’s board approved the use of bitcoin as a treasury reserve asset in March 2025, which led to momentous losses in just a year before they quietly walked away from the strategy.
There is another reason behind what seems to be an obvious trial balloon floated in the financial press: to quote Reuters again, “GameStop in January unveiled a compensation package worth roughly $35 billion for Cohen, hinging on a turnaround that requires him to lift the company’s market value to $100 billion and hit $10 billion in cumulative performance EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization).” That’s as good a reason as any to pursue a gargantuan buyout.
