Ryan Cohen, the chairman and CEO of GameStop, has made an unsolicited offer to buy eBay for approximately $55.5 billion, a move that would see a company worth roughly $12 billion attempt to swallow one nearly four times its size.
The offer, delivered in a letter to eBay’s board on Sunday, proposes $125 per share, split evenly between cash and GameStop stock, representing a 46% premium to eBay’s closing price on February 4, the day GameStop began building its stake in the e-commerce platform. GameStop has since accumulated a 5% position in eBay through shares and derivatives, and is filing a Schedule 13D and HSR notification.
eBay confirmed receipt of the offer on Monday, saying its board would review the proposal. The company noted it had “no discussions with or outreach from GameStop” before the bid arrived.
Cohen has never been shy about thinking big, and this deal is no different. In an interview, he laid out his ambitions plainly. “EBay should be worth—and will be worth—a lot more money,” Cohen said per the Wall Street Journal. “I’m thinking about turning eBay into something worth hundreds of billions of dollars.”
His pitch is to combine GameStop’s roughly 1,600 US brick-and-mortar locations with eBay’s 135-million-strong buyer base to build a formidable, physical-meets-digital commerce engine. Those stores, Cohen argues, could serve as local hubs for item authentication, intake, fulfillment, and live commerce, giving eBay the physical infrastructure that competitors like Amazon have spent billions building from scratch.
“It could be a legit competitor to Amazon,” Cohen said. He also mentioned that he believed he is uniquely suited for the task: “There is nobody who is more qualified, based on my experience, to run the eBay business,” he said, referencing his work at GameStop and Chewy, the online pet-products retailer he co-founded.
The money question
Pulling off a $56 billion acquisition when you’re a $12 billion company is no small feat.
GameStop has approximately $9.4 billion in cash and liquid investments on its balance sheet, and has secured what it calls a “highly-confident” commitment letter from TD Securities for up to $20 billion in debt financing. But that still leaves a significant gap. When pressed on Monday during an interview on CNBC’s Squawk Box, Cohen acknowledged GameStop’s flexibility.
“We are offering half cash, half stock, and we have the ability to issue stock in order to get the deal done,” he told CNBC. “But the full details of the offer are on our website.”
According to The Journal, Cohen may also seek backing from outside investors, including Middle Eastern sovereign-wealth funds, though nothing has been confirmed.
Morgan Stanley analysts cautioned that the market needs more clarity on funding, noting that an all-stock alternative could be a tough sell given what they described as the two companies’ “fundamentally different” business models, with few obvious revenue or cost synergies from combining a fee-based online marketplace with a traditional brick-and-mortar retailer.
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What eBay gets out of this — maybe
eBay is not exactly a company in distress.
Last week, it reported a 19% increase in first-quarter revenue and an 18% jump in gross merchandise volume to $22.2 billion. Its stock has climbed roughly 52% over the past year, buoyed by a strategic pivot toward high-demand niches like trading cards, rare sneakers, vintage fashion, and auto parts.
The company has also been investing heavily in artificial intelligence to improve the buyer and seller experience, including a partnership with OpenAI, while cutting its workforce by about 800 employees, or 6%, in February. And in a notable move to capture younger shoppers, eBay agreed to acquire Depop, Etsy’s secondhand fashion app, for $1.2 billion.
Analysts noted that even if Cohen’s bid fails, it could put eBay in the M&A spotlight and attract interest from other potential buyers.
Go hostile? Cohen is ready.
If eBay’s board doesn’t bite, Cohen has made clear he won’t simply walk away.
According to The Journal, he is prepared to take the offer directly to eBay shareholders in a proxy fight. One complication: the window for shareholders to nominate director candidates ahead of eBay’s June annual meeting has already closed, per the company’s own proxy materials.
Cohen’s personal financial incentives are also hard to ignore. Under a new compensation structure that GameStop announced in January, he stands to earn up to $35 billion in stock options, but only if the company hits certain performance targets, including a market capitalization of $100 billion. Acquiring eBay would be a giant leap toward that goal.
eBay says it will review the proposal with no further comment until that review is complete.
For more on how Amazon’s AI ambitions are reshaping the cloud and compute race, read our full breakdown of its expanding Anthropic partnership and $25 billion bet on Claude.
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