GameStop CEO Ryan Cohen is never going to buy eBay. That’s in large part because it’s not for sale and he doesn’t have a fraction of the money necessary to buy it. But that hasn’t stopped the tiresome mini-Musk from declaring he’ll buy it anyway. So much so that in June, the former pet food salesman declared he was abandoning his prospects for a $35 billion bonus in order to focus on the delusional goal of buying the online marketplace. Now, according to Bloomberg, Cohen is “considering withdrawing” from the $56 billion bid.
Ryan Cohen is unquestionably a very rich man. The co-founder of Chewy got a significant portion of the pet food’s $3.35 billion sale to PetSmart in 2017, and has splashed around huge piles of cash in various attention-seeking moves in the years since. In 2020 he invested $76 million into GameStop, just ahead of the flailing corporation’s memestock lunacy, before eventually becoming its CEO in the later fall-out. Since then he’s closed hundreds of stores, wasted untold money on NFTs and blockchain bullshit, and turned the former gaming chain into a Pokémon-scalping toy store. But for some reason this has failed to entirely occupy the man’s attention, with Cohen describing himself as not “passionate” about GameStop as he became obsessed by his inexplicable plan to buy eBay for $56 billion.
Cohen’s declaration was incomprehensible. From a very generous perspective, based on some extremely imaginative math, GameStop’s worth was maybe $11 billion when he revealed the plan in May of 2026. Its share price has since continued to tumble, currently at the lowest its been since the meme stonk crash of 2024, with the market cap geting ever lower, now sitting at $8.6 billion. There was a promise of a $20 billion loan from an investor, but the rest of the money needed to buy eBay? Well, an infamously disastrous car-crash interview with CNBC revealed that Cohen’s intention was seemingly to plug the gap with petulance. Now, in a shocking twist, people “familiar with the matter” are telling Bloomberg that Cohen is pondering withdrawing the bid. Which eBay must be finding rather confusing, given it resoundingly and forcefully rejected the offer three months back.
Musky smell
Cohen’s most recent move was buying up 9.8 percent of eBay by mid-July. “I’m not going to call my shots, but we’re coming for eBay one way or another,” he said at the time. Jump to three weeks later and this appears to have been diluted to a watery offer of a “partnership or joint venture” where eBay—an entirely online auction site—would be able to “leverage” GameStop’s 1,600 brick-and-mortar stores. All he wants in exchange now is a presence on eBay’s board, claim Bloomberg‘s insiders.
The notion that eBay would even bother considering this ludicrous proposal beggars belief. Not being a physical store has pretty much been the monolithic auction site’s route to success, and it’s impossible to imagine why it would want to do anything differently. A farcical, doomed-to-fail physical version of an eBay store was one of the core jokes in 2005’s The 40-Year-Old Virgin.
Cohen has just enough money to feel like he’s part of the billionaire class, but nowhere near enough to be taken seriously by anyone actually in it. Elon Musk can get away with such colossal scams and raids on Americans’ pensions like the SpaceX IPO because he’s richer than many other countries. Cohen seems to believe he has the same ability to just wish a reality into existence, and is then dumbfounded when the grown-ups in the room can barely be bothered to laugh at him.
My favorite irony of this entire idiotic situation is that if Cohen had actually stuck to and achieved his $35 billion bonus goal, he’d actually have enough money to take over eBay! Of course, that was contingent on his increasing the value of GameStop by a factor of 10, and clearly he has neither the skills nor patience to learn how to that. So instead he pretended he was no longer intending to focus on this bonus as it was a distraction from, er, buying eBay. Incredible stuff.
