The Dumbest Takeover Bid
Patrick Boyle On Finance
Patrick Boyle
4.9 • 308 Ratings
🗓️ 10 May 2026
⏱️ 31 minutes
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Summary
GameStop — the meme stock famous for selling physical video game discs to people who no longer buy physical video game discs — has made an unsolicited 56 billion dollar offer to acquire eBay. GameStop is worth approximately 12 billion dollars. The offer is non-binding, the financing includes a highly confident letter from a Canadian bank, and the shares required to complete the deal have not yet been authorised by shareholders. CEO Ryan Cohen went on CNBC on Monday morning to explain how this would all work. He said the details were on the website. We looked at the website.
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Transcript
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| 0:30.1 | Okay, so on Sunday evening, the video game retailer GameStop announced a $55.5 billion |
| 0:36.9 | unsolicited bid to buy the online auction |
| 0:40.2 | site eBay. This is an ambitious move for GameStop, primarily because GameStop |
| 0:45.8 | itself only has a market capitalization of around $12 billion. So they're attempting to buy |
| 0:53.1 | a company that's roughly five times their size, which can happen, |
| 0:57.6 | but it's not normally how acquisitions work. |
| 1:01.6 | Now some people have questioned the ambition of targeting eBay. |
| 1:05.8 | It is after all only five times game-stop size. |
| 1:09.6 | If you're going to announce a transformative non-binding |
| 1:12.6 | acquisition funded partly with shares that don't exist, why think so small? |
| 1:18.6 | Invidia has a market cap of around $4.5 trillion. GameStop could issue $5 trillion of stock |
| 1:26.3 | and make a proper run at it. There would even be genuine synergies. GameStop could issue $5 trillion of stock and make a proper run at it. |
| 1:28.8 | There would even be genuine synergies. GameStop stores already sell graphics cards to gamers. |
| 1:35.2 | You could describe it as a vertical integration play. That's the kind of language that gets |
| 1:40.0 | sovereign wealth funds excited. I'm not sure why Cohen left this on the table. |
| 1:45.7 | Now, eBay was founded in 1995 and went public in 1998. It was one of the original dot-com |
| 1:53.7 | stocks and it might surprise you to know that even in 2005 it was a bigger company than Amazon. |
| 2:06.4 | When it went public, almost all of the listings on eBay were for Beanie babies, which were themselves in a bubble at the time. |
| 2:09.0 | I think at one point, a stuffed purple bear was worth more than eBay servers. |
| 2:13.9 | So in a sense, eBay has always been a meme stock. It just took 30 years for |
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