GameStop Wants eBay? Make It Make Sense
UPDATE 5-3-2026
Further reporting by the Wall Street Journal puts GameStop CEO on the record, adding more details to bolster credibility as some analysts still question the move.
According to WSJ, Cohen said he is making an unsolicited offer to buy eBay for about $56 billion, seeing a path to make the ecommerce company into "something worth hundreds of billions of dollars.”
Cohen says GameStop has built a roughly 5% stake in eBay and will offer $125 a share in cash and stock, a roughly 20% premium to its closing price on Friday, with a commitment letter from TD Bank to provide around $20 billion in debt financing to help make a deal possible.
“I’m going to be as focused on eBay and as personally involved as I have been in the GameStop turnaround for the next few years,” Cohen said.
If eBay isn’t receptive to the proposal, Cohen is prepared to run a proxy fight and take his offer directly to shareholders.
More details on the deal - including a call out of slow buyer growth and lazy, inefficient spending under current eBay management:
Liz Morton
A Wall Street Journal scoop has lit a fire under GameStop and eBay stock prices, but does a potential deal for the retailer to buy the ecommerce marketplace really make sense?
Notably, the Journal cited only “people familiar with the matter,” with no sources willing to go on the record, in a paywalled article published after market close on a Friday. That alone should give investors pause.
According to those people, GameStop has been building a stake in eBay shares ahead of a potential offer as part of CEO Ryan Cohen’s plan to turn the retailer into a $100-billion+ giant.
But the idea of GameStop acquiring eBay isn’t new and it’s long been viewed as a stretch.
For months, Cohen has hinted at pursuing a major acquisition to reach that aspirational valuation (which he reportedly has a $35B bonus riding on), and analysts have floated eBay as a potential target since at least early February.
At the time, I dismissed that possibility as unlikely (though admittedly not impossible) as eBay’s market cap is approximately $44.98 billion, roughly four times that of GameStop at approximately $11.89 billion, creating a steep financial hurdle.
That mismatch still matters. Any deal would likely require a heavily stock-based structure (implying significant dilution), aggressive financing, or both. None of those paths are straightforward, especially for a company still in the midst of a strategic turnaround.
Recent developments make the idea even harder to justify.
In mid-February, eBay announced plans to acquire fashion marketplace Depop from Etsy in a $1.2B cash deal, now expected to close by the end of Q3.
Liz Morton
That transaction not only commits capital but also adds integration complexity and pushes out the timeline for meaningful returns.
According to eBay’s Q1 2026 earnings, Depop is not expected to be accretive to non-GAAP operating income until 2028.
Liz Morton
eBay is already in the middle of executing a long-term strategic bet. Layering a full-scale acquisition of the company on top of that would complicate both the financial math and any potential synergy story for GameStop.
There’s also a regulatory wrinkle that shouldn’t be overlooked.
eBay remains under a 3 year enhanced compliance monitoring order tied to its 2024 deferred prosecution agreement with the DOJ, after being found criminally liable for a 2019 harassment campaign targeting journalists Ina and David Steiner of EcommerceBytes.
Liz Morton
That agreement includes a notable emphasis on M&A due diligence. While primarily intended to govern eBay’s own acquisitions, it would almost certainly introduce additional scrutiny - and friction - into any transaction involving a sale of the company itself.
Liz Morton
Those M&A due diligence concerns stemmed largely from eBay's 2023 acquisition of collectible card game marketplace TCGPlayer, which expanded eBay's physical, labor-centric workforce and led to the first union in company history - later broken up when eBay moved operations from New York to Kentucky.
Liz Morton
While many commenting on this news rightly point out that TCGPlayer and Goldin Auctions (which eBay acquired in 2024) would be a perfect fit for GameStop, that fit also increases the potential for regulatory scrutiny.
eBay's TCGPlayer purchase raised competition concerns at the time, which would only be enhanced by a GameStop deal.
Liz Morton
And while neither eBay nor GameStop own card grading company PSA, they both have extensive business partnerships with the company, making recent developments around legal challenges to PSA parent company Collectors Holdings acquisitions of SGC and Beckett relevant to any potential GameStop eBay deal.
Liz Morton
Apparently I'm not the only one scratching my head over this news.
Paul Nary, an Assistant Professor of M&A Strategy at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania publicly questioned how such a deal could make sense.
Excuse me, what? GameStop $GME to bid for eBay? Huh?
— Paul Nary (@ProfPaulNary) May 1, 2026
Add this to my “I’m an M&A professor and I don’t understand this deal” file (ok it’s more of a “I’m highly skeptical about how this makes any sense” file) https://t.co/7AJlpapld6
CNBC’s Fast Money hosts appeared similarly puzzled, struggling to reconcile the report with the underlying fundamentals.
To be clear, none of this makes a deal impossible, but it does raise the bar considerably.
There are also multiple scenarios that could look more like a traditional activist bid to gain board seats and push for changes at eBay or the initial bid could end up being for majority rather than total ownership - at this point there's simply not enough actual, verified information to confidently say how this might play out.
GameStop and eBay did not respond to requests for comment as of publication.
Disclosure: Value Added Resource does not own stock in any of the companies covered and this article is not intended to be financial advice.
