> GameStop, which had a market value of around $11 billion [...] EBay is several times GameStop’s size, with a market value around $45 billion as of Friday’s close.
> Details of the potential offer for eBay couldn’t be learned.
This appears to be an attention stunt, of which Cohen has done a few since GME became a meme stock.
Not necessarily a stunt if they’ve taken a meaningful stake. Smaller companies can acquire larger ones. Market cap reflects equity, not enterprise value. If the target has low debt, the deal can be financed with borrowing. The 1980s LBO wave, led by Michael Milken, is a clear precedent.
I’ve searched the net to find the example, but I remember this happening during the dot com era too…
Some unknown tiny company made an offer to takeover Yahoo (or some similar company)… the tiny company made headlines for a moment then disappeared again.
It was an example of dot com silliness.
Can’t for the life of me remember, and Google can’t seem to either.
In that case though Paramount offloaded 25% to foreign wealth funds and had Larry Ellison willing to provide guarantee on(according to google) almost $50b of debt.
Besides the Larry Ellison, Trump, and Middle East backing, Paramount and WB's businesses have synergy.
Gamestop and eBay have no synergy. Gamestop can't possibly run eBay better than eBay's current management. It's a meme stock looking to make noise so they can get a higher stock price, and then unload their shares onto the public market to raise cash.
GME has 3x'ed their shares outstanding since Covid.
Yeah I don’t blame them. They didn’t create the meme but once it happened, any responsible leader would start doing secondary offerings to raise money. I sure would. If morons want to keep investing in the stock of a company that has no other chance of survival, great. Now they’ve got $9 billion on hand and they’ve had time to find a niche, right-size, and the interest on the cash pile is great too.
Hell, if they promised to do literally anything differently I’d support they. Worst case it’d be entertaining. Best case, both companies will be utterly destroyed.
They have deep synergies in the collectibles market. There's a Venn diagram with eBay on one side and Gamestop on the other, and cultural characters like Logan Paul with his $16m Pokemon card right in the intersection.
This is a big market getting bigger. Americans have more spending money than ever before, especially at the top end, and the collectibles market is expected to grow as much as 7% y/y for a long time. That's like $50b of new spend every year. Massive opportunity.
I think this is smart. Gamestop is a vibes company, everyone knows it, and this is an opportunity to acquire a real business with strong tailwinds. Everyone knows eBay has been poorly run for 20 years. Even in 2010/2011 when I worked there it was running on empty so to speak. Some opportunity to take control of that narrative and grow the business in demographics with deep pockets would be huge.
I could see a synergy. Remember when there was a small trend of strip-mall "We'll sell on eBay for you" shops?
That seemed like a great idea for certain types of goods-- the market for plenty of collectibles are thin in any given locality, but it was always clumsy to get to the global marketplace. If you had a normal consumer eBay account with 30 feedback, you might have a hard time getting trust against sellers with 400,000. You had to deal with packing, shipping, nonpayment, complaints.
Handing it all off to a professional with experience and a high volume credible account was worth a consignment commission. But they seemed to dry up after a while, I think when eBay pivoted from "the world's garage sale" to "AliExpress but some products are in domestic warehouses."
If you had a widely deployed retail presence that was already used to dealing with used merchandise (pawnshop-style laws, routing items for cleaning/refubrishment etc), turning the tradein counter into a consignment counter is a potential win. New revenue stream, gets people in the door, and provides an expectation of legitimacy and predictability.
NFT’s and crypto nonsense, for starters. Go look him up and what he has done at GameStop. He’s not exactly shy about his plans and likes to make dramatic statements.
The attention stunts were a strategy toward finding profitability for the core GME business model.
This is significantly different, in line with a strategy that seems to have been in place since he became CEO of Gamestop.
This appears to be an attempt to take over eBay the same way he took over Gamestop by acquiring a 51% controlling interest with capital he will raise by further diluting the value of Gamestop shares.
It appears long term he is trying to build the, "Amazon of the secondhand market".
I remember showing up to buy a new Call of Duty game on release day, back when physical was the only way to buy games and seeing tons of people with boxes full of old games and consoles. I realized then that GameStop's differentiation from other retailers was that it was also a kind of pawn shop.
To be clear, if GameStop has no intent or ability to do the things they’re saying they’re going to do, as a public company in respect of another, that’s all kinds of securities fraud and shareholder-lawsuit catnip.
Put another way, if you think this is fake you could make a lot of money. Because that would mean GameStop is de facto offering the market a free put on its own and eBay’s stock.
If you want to look at facts (these come from yahoo finance): 36% of their stock is held by institutions, another ~9% by insiders. Ebay is 95% held by institutions (that sounds insane but I don't follow markets, maybe its normal) and it went up 11% yesterday. That sounds like institutional traders think this is real, right? Ebay is at or near an all time high so why would anyone want to buy at an all time high? Maybe this is a pump and dump on ebay by Wall St? Get retail traders hyped, your stock bumps 10% or more, then dump shares.
I don't understand how a smaller publicly traded company can buy a larger publicly traded company. Don't they need to have a majority of shares or enough to demand a board seat? A deal like that probably needs to have outside investors and/or some leverage of some kind.
That depends on what you mean by "meme stock investors". Retail probably doesn't move an $11 billion market cap company 7% over the 5 hours BEFORE the WSJ article drops. Institutional investors trading on Gamestop's volatility might, though. There are other options, too, but those get into unpopular conspiracy theories and I don't want to nuke my karma.
I love eBay, for both buying and selling used items that are viable to ship.
We let CraigsList get broken, with seemingly much fewer sellers and buyers than it used to have.
I tried Facebook Marketplace, which is where most local buyers&sellers seemed to move to. But I won't install their app, and the notification emails only sometimes came through. (One buyer became very irate when I didn't respond promptly.) Also, their pretend E2E encryption for messages on their Web site was just annoying (like a dark pattern intended to make people hate E2E, while not actually providing any significant security).
eBay has been a savior for me buying for buying old / replacement parts. No idea where some of these sellers get their inventory but I'm so glad they exist and we can both use eBay to transact.
If only eBay would fix their search. In the old days the search modifiers actually did what you think they should do. It's been broken for over 20 years now.
What search modifiers? I regularly use minus, double-quotes, and parentheses, and they all work well for me.
The main thing I dislike about eBay search is all the sponsored placements violating the sorting order. For example, if you sort on increasing price, sponsored placements not in the specified sorting order litter that heavily, making it hard to follow. Amazon searches have the same problem. (Problem, from the perspective of buyer-on-the-marketplace.)
The other thing I dislike about both eBay and Amazon searches is the spamming of huge numbers of listings for essentially the same item. I notice it more on Amazon than eBay.
The minus, double-quotes and parentheses work in many situations, but not in all situations, all of the time. They used to be deterministic. Just this week I found some more searches where wrapping a specific two-word phrase in quotes would actually remove half of the auctions that had that exact phrase in the title. And others where minusing out a term stubbornly refused to remove it.
The worst thing is when you are searching for an item, but most of the listings are those "multiple different specification" listings. e.g. a seller has 8GB, 16GB and 32GB USB sticks. It's almost impossible to compare listings and the price you see is clickbait because once you click through you find the thing you were searching for is several times higher. I wrote a bookmarklet to remove all these, but that's not ideal because it can over-correct.
Now that you mention it, I infrequently see behavior like that.
I wonder whether I see it less often because my bookmarked search queries are careful to avoid things in the URL that look like they might be IDs for cached queries/results.
Also, a few times I wondered whether I was accidentally triggering anti-scraping poisoning measures, even though I was doing the search and paging manually.
This would of course negatively impact eBay because it would now be saddled with immense debt. To pay this debt, there would be mass layoffs leading to a decline in customer service, quality and innovation.
Deals like this benefit nobody but shareholders (in the short term) and lenders. The workers at the companies get laid off, consumers get worse products, and the odds of bankruptcy spike. Leveraged buyouts seem like a net negative to society.
> ”Whatever you do, don't break eBay. […] Facebook Marketplace, which is where most local buyers&sellers seemed to move to.”
I too actually rely on eBay as an alternative to _every other online store_.
It’s curious you mention facebook and eBay together. I find FBMP completely unusable because of what their search feature returns—garbage. It functions like their whole platform by trying to grab your attention with things it thinks you might want (how else to interpret unrelated results?) but didn’t ask for.
Despite eBay hobbling their search feature by removing Boolean operators, I find the two platforms couldn’t be more different.
I wonder how those bagholders are feeling now, still diamond hands holding to the moon? Hell, there are still Bed Bath and Beyond and even Sears bagholders somehow thinking they'll get back money from a bankrupt and dissolved company, so I can't be too surprised.
Probably a good time to scrape eBay and collect all of the seller ratings in a big Excel file before GameStop knows what's happening. There will be a market for an EBay that isn't pushing you to buy Pokemon cards or Funko Pops every 5 seconds, but you need that list.
> GameStop, which had a market value of around $11 billion [...] EBay is several times GameStop’s size, with a market value around $45 billion as of Friday’s close.
> Details of the potential offer for eBay couldn’t be learned.
This appears to be an attention stunt, of which Cohen has done a few since GME became a meme stock.
Not necessarily a stunt if they’ve taken a meaningful stake. Smaller companies can acquire larger ones. Market cap reflects equity, not enterprise value. If the target has low debt, the deal can be financed with borrowing. The 1980s LBO wave, led by Michael Milken, is a clear precedent.
I’ve searched the net to find the example, but I remember this happening during the dot com era too…
Some unknown tiny company made an offer to takeover Yahoo (or some similar company)… the tiny company made headlines for a moment then disappeared again.
It was an example of dot com silliness.
Can’t for the life of me remember, and Google can’t seem to either.
Similar to when koenigsegg attempted to purchase saab, it can be a great way to get publicity.
> saab
I really loved my 9-3 turbo...
Maybe but we have a recent sample of Paramount ($12b) acquiring WB ($62b).
That would be more accurately described as Larry Ellison (~$200b) acquiring WB.
Who gave it in writing that he can back the deal if need be.
In that case though Paramount offloaded 25% to foreign wealth funds and had Larry Ellison willing to provide guarantee on(according to google) almost $50b of debt.
Ryan Cohen is rich but he's not that rich.
I believe it was this time last year Ryan had a sit down with the Qatari sovereign wealth fund.
Besides the Larry Ellison, Trump, and Middle East backing, Paramount and WB's businesses have synergy.
Gamestop and eBay have no synergy. Gamestop can't possibly run eBay better than eBay's current management. It's a meme stock looking to make noise so they can get a higher stock price, and then unload their shares onto the public market to raise cash.
GME has 3x'ed their shares outstanding since Covid.
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/GME/gamestop/share...
Yeah I don’t blame them. They didn’t create the meme but once it happened, any responsible leader would start doing secondary offerings to raise money. I sure would. If morons want to keep investing in the stock of a company that has no other chance of survival, great. Now they’ve got $9 billion on hand and they’ve had time to find a niche, right-size, and the interest on the cash pile is great too.
> Gamestop can't possibly run eBay better than eBay's current management.
I meaaaaaaan...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EBay_stalking_scandal
"Deferred Prosecution Agreement with District of Massachusetts" still sits in the eBay footer. ;)
What in the actual fuck? I can't believe I never heard about this before, this is batshit insane.
If they promised to revert eBay's search to how it worked in 1997 I'd throw them a few dollars to bolster their "takeover."
Hell, if they promised to do literally anything differently I’d support they. Worst case it’d be entertaining. Best case, both companies will be utterly destroyed.
They have deep synergies in the collectibles market. There's a Venn diagram with eBay on one side and Gamestop on the other, and cultural characters like Logan Paul with his $16m Pokemon card right in the intersection.
This is a big market getting bigger. Americans have more spending money than ever before, especially at the top end, and the collectibles market is expected to grow as much as 7% y/y for a long time. That's like $50b of new spend every year. Massive opportunity.
I think this is smart. Gamestop is a vibes company, everyone knows it, and this is an opportunity to acquire a real business with strong tailwinds. Everyone knows eBay has been poorly run for 20 years. Even in 2010/2011 when I worked there it was running on empty so to speak. Some opportunity to take control of that narrative and grow the business in demographics with deep pockets would be huge.
They have no synergy. One is a meme stock that sells video games in retail stores. The other is an auction site eCommerce platform.
Collectibles is tiny market for eBay. They sell mostly mass produced goods and random used things.
Went into one today. They sell about as much collectible crap as they do videogames these days.
> Americans have more spending money than ever before
WHAT?
> especially at the top end
Ahh, that's the correct identifier.
It's an extremely K-shaped economy.
I could see a synergy. Remember when there was a small trend of strip-mall "We'll sell on eBay for you" shops?
That seemed like a great idea for certain types of goods-- the market for plenty of collectibles are thin in any given locality, but it was always clumsy to get to the global marketplace. If you had a normal consumer eBay account with 30 feedback, you might have a hard time getting trust against sellers with 400,000. You had to deal with packing, shipping, nonpayment, complaints.
Handing it all off to a professional with experience and a high volume credible account was worth a consignment commission. But they seemed to dry up after a while, I think when eBay pivoted from "the world's garage sale" to "AliExpress but some products are in domestic warehouses."
If you had a widely deployed retail presence that was already used to dealing with used merchandise (pawnshop-style laws, routing items for cleaning/refubrishment etc), turning the tradein counter into a consignment counter is a potential win. New revenue stream, gets people in the door, and provides an expectation of legitimacy and predictability.
The synergy is "corruption"
KMart famously aquired the much larger Sears (and then destroyed it)
Well, that, and the CEO of Sears was an Ayn Rand fan who decided departments needed to fight each other over everything.
As a matter of fact, ESL had bought Kmart and used it as a vehicle to acquire Sears. It was the same person.
Same for McDonnell-Douglas and Boeing.
> an attention stunt, of which Cohen has done a few since GME became a meme stock
What would be these few attention stunts he did?
NFT’s and crypto nonsense, for starters. Go look him up and what he has done at GameStop. He’s not exactly shy about his plans and likes to make dramatic statements.
The attention stunts were a strategy toward finding profitability for the core GME business model.
This is significantly different, in line with a strategy that seems to have been in place since he became CEO of Gamestop.
This appears to be an attempt to take over eBay the same way he took over Gamestop by acquiring a 51% controlling interest with capital he will raise by further diluting the value of Gamestop shares.
It appears long term he is trying to build the, "Amazon of the secondhand market".
I remember showing up to buy a new Call of Duty game on release day, back when physical was the only way to buy games and seeing tons of people with boxes full of old games and consoles. I realized then that GameStop's differentiation from other retailers was that it was also a kind of pawn shop.
However GameStop does have like $9 billion in cash on hand if I recall correctly.
To be clear, if GameStop has no intent or ability to do the things they’re saying they’re going to do, as a public company in respect of another, that’s all kinds of securities fraud and shareholder-lawsuit catnip.
Put another way, if you think this is fake you could make a lot of money. Because that would mean GameStop is de facto offering the market a free put on its own and eBay’s stock.
This probably would have been investigated in the 2010s. Since covid, security fraud seems to be rampant.
Gamestop is just in the business of selling their shares to retail. It's pretty much like a crypto shitcoin.
Ryan Cohen rarely does interviews & Lauren Thomas is one of the few journalists he agreed to speak to, they had an interview earlier this year - https://www.wsj.com/finance/stocks/gamestop-ceo-plans-e8440c...
If you check eBay & GME's stock prices after the announcement, the market seems to think there are at least serious discussions here if not more.
GME stock price is not really a reliable metric for measuring the seriousness of anything.
...because you decided so?
Apologies. Maybe you just came out of a coma that spans half a decade and is unaware of the events surrounding GME stock.
It's a bit of a rabbit hole, but this is a good place to start: https://youtu.be/5pYeoZaoWrA?si=3YZ1SpRxOB9sglVG
Does “the market” not mean meme stock investors in this instance though?
Headline-driven market is a thing, not sure why meme stock investors are part of this? How are they connected to this news?
Also, what's a meme stock? How would you define that?
If you want to look at facts (these come from yahoo finance): 36% of their stock is held by institutions, another ~9% by insiders. Ebay is 95% held by institutions (that sounds insane but I don't follow markets, maybe its normal) and it went up 11% yesterday. That sounds like institutional traders think this is real, right? Ebay is at or near an all time high so why would anyone want to buy at an all time high? Maybe this is a pump and dump on ebay by Wall St? Get retail traders hyped, your stock bumps 10% or more, then dump shares.
I don't understand how a smaller publicly traded company can buy a larger publicly traded company. Don't they need to have a majority of shares or enough to demand a board seat? A deal like that probably needs to have outside investors and/or some leverage of some kind.
That depends on what you mean by "meme stock investors". Retail probably doesn't move an $11 billion market cap company 7% over the 5 hours BEFORE the WSJ article drops. Institutional investors trading on Gamestop's volatility might, though. There are other options, too, but those get into unpopular conspiracy theories and I don't want to nuke my karma.
"the market" that moves gme stock is a meme subreddit but yes
Whatever you do, don't break eBay.
I love eBay, for both buying and selling used items that are viable to ship.
We let CraigsList get broken, with seemingly much fewer sellers and buyers than it used to have.
I tried Facebook Marketplace, which is where most local buyers&sellers seemed to move to. But I won't install their app, and the notification emails only sometimes came through. (One buyer became very irate when I didn't respond promptly.) Also, their pretend E2E encryption for messages on their Web site was just annoying (like a dark pattern intended to make people hate E2E, while not actually providing any significant security).
eBay has been a savior for me buying for buying old / replacement parts. No idea where some of these sellers get their inventory but I'm so glad they exist and we can both use eBay to transact.
If only eBay would fix their search. In the old days the search modifiers actually did what you think they should do. It's been broken for over 20 years now.
What search modifiers? I regularly use minus, double-quotes, and parentheses, and they all work well for me.
The main thing I dislike about eBay search is all the sponsored placements violating the sorting order. For example, if you sort on increasing price, sponsored placements not in the specified sorting order litter that heavily, making it hard to follow. Amazon searches have the same problem. (Problem, from the perspective of buyer-on-the-marketplace.)
The other thing I dislike about both eBay and Amazon searches is the spamming of huge numbers of listings for essentially the same item. I notice it more on Amazon than eBay.
The minus, double-quotes and parentheses work in many situations, but not in all situations, all of the time. They used to be deterministic. Just this week I found some more searches where wrapping a specific two-word phrase in quotes would actually remove half of the auctions that had that exact phrase in the title. And others where minusing out a term stubbornly refused to remove it.
The worst thing is when you are searching for an item, but most of the listings are those "multiple different specification" listings. e.g. a seller has 8GB, 16GB and 32GB USB sticks. It's almost impossible to compare listings and the price you see is clickbait because once you click through you find the thing you were searching for is several times higher. I wrote a bookmarklet to remove all these, but that's not ideal because it can over-correct.
Now that you mention it, I infrequently see behavior like that.
I wonder whether I see it less often because my bookmarked search queries are careful to avoid things in the URL that look like they might be IDs for cached queries/results.
Also, a few times I wondered whether I was accidentally triggering anti-scraping poisoning measures, even though I was doing the search and paging manually.
This would of course negatively impact eBay because it would now be saddled with immense debt. To pay this debt, there would be mass layoffs leading to a decline in customer service, quality and innovation.
Deals like this benefit nobody but shareholders (in the short term) and lenders. The workers at the companies get laid off, consumers get worse products, and the odds of bankruptcy spike. Leveraged buyouts seem like a net negative to society.
> ”Whatever you do, don't break eBay. […] Facebook Marketplace, which is where most local buyers&sellers seemed to move to.”
I too actually rely on eBay as an alternative to _every other online store_.
It’s curious you mention facebook and eBay together. I find FBMP completely unusable because of what their search feature returns—garbage. It functions like their whole platform by trying to grab your attention with things it thinks you might want (how else to interpret unrelated results?) but didn’t ask for.
Despite eBay hobbling their search feature by removing Boolean operators, I find the two platforms couldn’t be more different.
First thing gamestop did when they bought Impulse (digital game distribution service) is make it US only.
I wonder how those bagholders are feeling now, still diamond hands holding to the moon? Hell, there are still Bed Bath and Beyond and even Sears bagholders somehow thinking they'll get back money from a bankrupt and dissolved company, so I can't be too surprised.
https://reddit.com/gallery/1t1aeky
Time ticks for everyone... One day some company will be buying the remains of Amazon.
https://www.wsj.com/business/deals/gamestop-preparing-offer-...
Probably a good time to scrape eBay and collect all of the seller ratings in a big Excel file before GameStop knows what's happening. There will be a market for an EBay that isn't pushing you to buy Pokemon cards or Funko Pops every 5 seconds, but you need that list.
There's no way GameStop is buying eBay... This is noise.
eBay is actually a competent engineering organization
Oh no. Please, please don't let eBay get Boeing'd.
Best I can do is three dollars
History rhymes, same playbook as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MCI_Inc.
ebay is the worst, they might as well buy shein
This is so fucking retarded but the k(etamine) market will say sure that makes sense pump and dump it and quants will make millions.
so price manipulation
“Best I can do is $1.25 not a lot of demand for used” <squints at the package> “online marketplace sites.”
LOL. Ebay is like 50-100x bigger than memestock. This is fake news, or just some bs some ceo said drunk.
Bed Bath and Beyond preparing offer for Costco /s