GameStop CEO Ryan Cohen, who previously led pet marketplace Chewy, told The Wall Street Journal that GameStop had built a roughly 5% stake in eBay and had a commitment of up to $20 billion in financing from TD Bank. If eBay isn’t receptive, Cohen said he was prepared for a proxy fight, according to the outlet.
“I’m thinking about turning eBay into something worth hundreds of billions of dollars,” Cohen told the Journal. “It could be a legit competitor to Amazon.”
It’s still unclear how exactly GameStop, at a fraction of eBay’s size, would secure all the money needed for the transaction. GameStop representatives did not respond to a request for comment for this story.
The bold move from Cohen exemplifies how, over the past six years, GameStop has repositioned the company from one struggling with lower physical video game software and hardware sales to one with far bigger ambitions, arguably beyond its scope. GameStop’s annual net sales had fallen 21% from 2018 to 2019, and the company reported a net loss of of $464.4 million in fiscal 2019.
Cohen joined the board of GameStop and became chairman in 2020, about a year before the company became known as a “meme stock,” attracting the attention of casual investors on Reddit. The GameStop investing craze was possibly at least in part a result of Cohen’s erratic behavior on Twitter, where he would entice people by, for example, posting an image of an ice cream cone with the caption being solely a frog emoji.
