Struggling Retailer GameStop Is Reportedly Trying To Buy EBay?!

GameStop, the struggling brick-and-mortar online game retailer with a market worth of about $12 billion, needs to purchase eBay, an e-commerce firm value round $46 billion.

This comes from a Wall Street Journal report which says that GameStop is quietly build up a stake in eBay shares in preparation for a proposal that would come by the top of this month.

The report doesn’t recommend what a proposal would appear like or how it will be acquired, although a supply chatting with The WSJ recommended that GameStop CEO Ryan Cohen might take the provide on to eBay’s shareholders if the corporate’s management isn’t .

GameStop’s most up-to-date earnings report for the total yr of 2025 has the corporate’s gross sales at $3.6 billion, down from $3.8 billion the yr earlier than, and its working earnings lastly within the black at $232.1 million after a number of years operating within the pink, with the corporate seeing an working loss in 2024 of $26.2 million. In the meantime eBay, which simply reported its first quarter 2026 outcomes, posted income of $3.1 billion for the quarter, up 19 p.c year-over-year. The corporate’s full-year 2025 income was $11.1 billion, up 8 p.c from the prior yr.

GameStop has struggled over the past decade, initially as a result of a broad trade decline in bodily recreation gross sales amid the rise of digital that solely accelerated in the course of the top of the COVID-19 pandemic. What adopted was a number of years of chaotic decision-making as a number of leaders tried to get the corporate again on monitor. In 2021, following a brief squeeze of GameStop’s inventory that despatched it sky-high for a number of weeks, then-CEO George Sherman introduced he would step down, and Chewy founder Ryan Cohen joined the board. In 2022, GameStop launched an NFT marketplace, after which shut it down the next yr. Then in 2023, Cohen took over as CEO with plans to revitalize the struggling enterprise, which took the type of large employees and retailer location cuts, promoting some worldwide operations, and griping about DEI for some reason. Most just lately, GameStop has been touting a “return” to physical and retro games, together with plans for “retro” sections in all its U.S. shops someday this month. It’s additionally seemingly been involved in shopping for vast amounts of Bitcoin.

At this time’s information comes following Cohen’s comments earlier this year that he needed GameStop to accumulate a significant firm in an effort to lift its market cap to $100 billion, a transfer which might earn him a $35 billion payout. Absurd because it appears for GameStop to choose up a a lot larger and seemingly much less chaotic firm than itself, Cohen appears ready to take a protracted, lengthy shot. “It’s finally both going to be genius or completely, completely silly,” he stated in January of a possible acquisition.

Cohen has additionally long had a cult following within the funding neighborhood, extra particularly amongst those interested in memestocks, and his actions in the past have led to surprising funding surges primarily based solely on his personal decisions, and even simply his social media posts. Who is aware of what even a whisper about GameStop buying eBay will do to each firms’ inventory costs?