The offer was $125 a share. Half cash, half stock. Total value: roughly $56 billion, for a company five times the size of the one making the bid.

Ryan Cohen, the chairman and CEO of GameStop - yes, the video game retailer - formally proposed on May 3 to acquire eBay, one of the internet's oldest and most recognizable marketplaces. He announced it on a Sunday. By Monday, his own stock had dropped 10%.

In a 27-minute interview published the following day on YouTube, Cohen sat down with the hosts of TBPN and explained his thinking in unusually direct terms. There were no PowerPoint slides and no investment banker prose. The core thesis, stripped to its bones: eBay is a durable business run like a public utility, not a company. It spends too much. It moves too slowly. And the website still looks like 1995.

"I could run that business from my house," Cohen said, unprompted. "It's eBay."

That line will either sound like visionary clarity or delusional overconfidence - depending entirely on whether the deal gets done.

The Background

To understand what is actually being proposed here, it helps to understand what both companies are, and what they are not.

eBay is a two-sided marketplace - meaning it does not buy or sell anything itself. It simply connects buyers and sellers, takes a cut of each transaction, and charges for advertising on its platform. Founded in 1995, it was once the most dominant e-commerce platform on the internet. Then Amazon grew into a logistics empire. Then Etsy came for handmade goods. Then TikTok Shop and Temu arrived. Each one chipped away at a specific category where eBay had been strong.

And yet eBay has not died. The company posted $11.1 billion in annual revenue for fiscal year 2025, up nearly 8% from the prior year. It has 130 million active users globally. It generates over $2 billion a year in operating cash flow. It has, against all expectations, survived.

The problem, according to Cohen, is that surviving and thriving are not the same thing. In fiscal 2025, eBay spent $2.4 billion on sales and marketing while adding fewer than one million net active buyers - a net increase of less than 0.75% in its user base. That is an extraordinary amount of money for essentially no growth.

GameStop, meanwhile, is a brick-and-mortar video game retailer that was widely expected to go bankrupt as gaming shifted to digital downloads and streaming. Cohen joined the board in January 2021 and was swept into global fame when Reddit traders turned GameStop shares into one of the most chaotic market episodes in modern history - shares spiked 1,500% in two weeks. Cohen eventually became CEO in September 2023 and quietly did something most observers did not expect: he turned the company around. Not by pivoting to some grand new strategy, but by cutting costs with almost surgical aggression. GameStop went from a $381 million net loss in fiscal 2021 to $418 million of net income in fiscal 2025, reducing its overhead - known as SG&A, or selling, general and administrative expenses, the costs of running a business beyond just making the product - by roughly $800 million, a 47% reduction.

That track record is the entire foundation of this bid.

What Is Actually Happening

On May 3, 2026, GameStop filed formal documents with U.S. regulators and sent a letter directly to eBay's board chairman, Paul Pressler. The offer was $125 per share, split evenly between cash and GameStop common stock, representing a 46% premium to eBay's closing price on February 4 - the day GameStop had quietly started buying eBay shares. The total implied deal value was approximately $55.5 billion.

The financing structure is where the complexity - and the skepticism - begins. GameStop's market value is roughly $11 billion, and it is trying to buy a company worth $56 billion. To bridge that gap, Cohen has assembled pieces: GameStop secured an initial, nonbinding "highly confident letter" from TD Bank to provide approximately $20 billion of debt financing - meaning the bank has expressed confidence it could arrange the borrowing, without committing to do so. GameStop also holds about $9 billion in cash on its balance sheet. The rest would involve issuing new GameStop shares.

That last part is where it gets complicated for existing GameStop shareholders. Issuing new shares to fund an acquisition dilutes - reduces the proportional ownership of - everyone who already holds the stock. In the TBPN interview, Cohen was direct about the logic: existing eBay shareholders would take half their value off the table in cash, and roll the other half into the combined company. His argument is that even with dilution, the combined entity will be worth substantially more than the sum of its parts.

In terms of what he would actually do with eBay, Cohen pointed to three things.

First, cost cuts. GameStop's plan, filed with the SEC, targets $2 billion in annualized cost reductions within twelve months of closing, broken down across sales and marketing (-$1.2 billion), product development (-$0.3 billion), and corporate overhead (-$0.5 billion). Cohen noted in the interview that eBay has 11,500 employees running a marketplace that carries no inventory and owns no warehouses - what is sometimes called an asset-light business model. He was blunt: that headcount does not make sense for the type of business eBay actually is.

Second, physical authentication. GameStop's 1,600 retail stores in the United States would serve as drop-off and verification points for high-value items sold through eBay - particularly collectibles, trading cards, and luxury goods. The trust problem on eBay, Cohen argued, is structural: buyers do not always know if an item is genuine. Physical stores solve that.

Third, live commerce. Live commerce refers to real-time video shopping - think home shopping television updated for social media, where a creator sells products to viewers in real time. It is enormous in China, growing fast in Southeast Asia, and still early in the United States. Cohen believes eBay's 130 million users represent a dormant audience for exactly this format, and that the platform's failure to build it is a management problem, not a market problem.

The Money Trail

The financial logic of this deal is cleaner than most hostile takeover bids - which does not mean it is simple.

Cohen's argument about eBay's costs is supported by the numbers. On cost reductions alone, GameStop's plan projects that eBay's diluted earnings per share would increase from $4.26 to $7.79 in year one. That is a near-doubling of per-share profit without growing the business at all - simply by removing spending that is not generating returns. The marketing budget Cohen is targeting spent $2.4 billion to attract fewer than a million new buyers. For context: that is roughly $2,400 per new user acquired on a platform where the average transaction fee is a fraction of that.

The counterargument is that cutting marketing at a marketplace is not like cutting marketing at a consumer brand. eBay's sellers need buyers to show up. The moment buyer traffic slows, sellers list elsewhere. The moment sellers leave, buyers follow. Marketplaces are fragile in ways that balance sheets do not fully capture.

Cohen's rebuttal, delivered both in SEC filings and in the interview, is that eBay's brand is already universally known. Everyone knows what eBay is. Cohen's position: "More spend is not producing more users on a marketplace with near-universal brand recognition." He applied the same logic to GameStop - he slashed marketing there too, and revenue did not collapse.

The board compensation figures he cited in the interview add another dimension. He noted that eBay's board members each earn $350,000 to $450,000 per year, and that there has been no insider buying - meaning the people running the company are not buying its stock with their own money. To Cohen, this is the clearest signal that the business is being run by professionals optimizing for their own positions, not by owners optimizing for the long-term value of the enterprise.

Cohen's own compensation structure at GameStop is structured as the opposite of that. His performance award requires GameStop's market capitalization to reach $100 billion and achieve $10 billion in cumulative EBITDA for it to fully vest - and he takes no salary, no bonuses, and no guaranteed equity. In the interview, he said plainly: "If I don't hit the thresholds, then I don't get anything."

The financing gap remains the central uncertainty. Cohen mentioned conversations with "a variety of different options" for capital providers, including potentially international sovereign wealth funds - large government-controlled investment pools from countries like Saudi Arabia, Norway, or Singapore that often co-invest in major corporate transactions. Whether those conversations are substantive or aspirational is not yet clear.

What People Are Doing About It

eBay's board confirmed it received the offer and said it would review it. No timeline was given, and the language was notably noncommittal. eBay's shares rose about 5% on the day of the announcement - to around $109 - well below the $125 offer price. That gap signals that the market does not currently believe the deal gets done at that price.

GameStop shareholders reacted poorly at first. GameStop's stock sank 10% on the day the deal was announced. The concern is straightforward: a $56 billion acquisition financed substantially through new stock issuance means existing shareholders get diluted significantly. The bet requires believing that Cohen can extract enough value from eBay to make everyone whole - including the new debt load.

Michael Burry - the investor made famous by the film The Big Short for predicting the 2008 mortgage collapse - was reported to have exited his GameStop position around the time the deal became public. Cohen addressed this in the interview with characteristic brevity: he hadn't spoken to Burry in a long time, and the leverage involved likely didn't fit Burry's risk profile.

eBay's employees are, by implication, the ones most exposed. Cohen was not subtle about what a cost-cutting mandate of $2 billion against a company with 11,500 employees and $5.2 billion in operating expenses actually means in practice. In the interview, he acknowledged he had received a call from his own GameStop team that morning, alerting him that employees were already searching his interview for signals about what was coming. He told the story with something close to amusement.

On the retail investor side, the response was mixed but enthusiastic among GameStop's core supporters - the same community that drove the 2021 meme stock frenzy. Comments under the TBPN interview included assessments ranging from "this is an amazing idea" to "RC plan makes so much sense." The base has not lost faith.

The Bottom Line

Ryan Cohen has built exactly one track record: taking a struggling brick-and-mortar business and cutting its costs until it became profitable. He is now betting that the same logic scales to a $56 billion e-commerce company with global operations, 130 million users, and a board that has shown no interest in selling. The cost thesis is defensible. The financing structure is incomplete. The platform vision - collectibles authentication, live commerce, digital goods - is credible but unproven at this scale. Whether this becomes a transformational deal or an expensive lesson in the difference between cost-cutting and company-building will depend almost entirely on whether eBay's board picks up the phone.

Timeline

  • February 4, 2026 - GameStop begins quietly accumulating a stake in eBay through derivatives and common stock purchases, reaching a 5% economic position.
  • January 7, 2026 - GameStop announces a long-term performance award for Ryan Cohen, requiring the company to reach a $100 billion market cap for the award to fully vest.
  • May 3, 2026 - GameStop formally submits a non-binding acquisition proposal to eBay's board at $125 per share, filing a Schedule 13D and HSR notification. TD Securities provides a highly confident letter for up to $20 billion in debt financing.
  • May 4, 2026 - eBay confirms it received the offer and says its board will review it. GameStop stock falls 10%. eBay shares rise roughly 5% to around $109, well below the $125 offer price. Cohen appears on CNBC in a combative interview.
  • May 5, 2026 - Cohen sits down for a full 27-minute interview with TBPN, laying out the deal structure, cost thesis, and vision for the combined company in detail. He confirms GameStop has $9 billion in cash on its balance sheet and the TD Securities letter for $20 billion.

Summary

Who: Ryan Cohen, chairman and CEO of GameStop, and eBay Inc.

What: An unsolicited, non-binding bid by GameStop to acquire eBay at $125 per share - half cash, half GameStop stock - for a total implied value of approximately $55.5 billion. The deal would create a combined company Cohen would run personally, with no salary, targeting $2 billion in annual cost reductions within the first year.

When: The offer was submitted on May 3, 2026. Cohen appeared publicly to defend and explain it on May 4 and 5.

Where: GameStop is headquartered in Grapevine, Texas. eBay is based in San Jose, California. The proposed deal would combine GameStop's roughly 1,600 U.S. retail locations with eBay's global online marketplace.

Why: Cohen argues eBay is a durable platform being run inefficiently - spending $2.4 billion on marketing to add fewer than one million new users per year, and operating with $5.5 billion in annual expenses on an asset-light business that carries no inventory. He believes the same cost discipline that returned GameStop to profitability can unlock substantially higher earnings at eBay, while the physical store network gives eBay a unique authentication and fulfillment capability its online-only competitors cannot replicate.