eBay Rejects GameStop's $56B Takeover as Not Credible

tombert

I really thought it was going to be the other way around. I am quite confident that if GameStop bought eBay, they would ruin it in the same way that K-Mart buying Sears ruined that company. I could be wrong, I'm not a business person, but it seems kind of obvious that a company like GameStop, whose current existence appears to be due to a weird short squeeze anomaly, is not a sustainable business.

SwellJoe

Any reasonable person could see this was a ridiculous clown show, put on by the ridiculous clown show meme stock company.

gedy

I'm pretty sure this was just a stunt to manipulate both stock prices for some short term play.

cmiles8

Well if you’ve seen the CNBC interview with the GameStop CEO he couldn’t answer basic questions about the deal so the outcome here isn’t surprising. The interview was so bad the first time I saw it I thought it was some sort of satire bit. No, it was real and the commentators were literally speechless.

qrush

As a avid eBay customer I am pretty relieved. I buy 2-3 items a month and was selling for the last 2 years on the platform. It's come such a long way and is really a great, streamlined experience. Of course I'm sure folks that make their living off their stores & sales will have different opinions, but I'd say as a routine customer and seller it doesn't need an external company's takeover pressure on it.

bstsb

alternate link: https://archive.ph/rsC6e

echelon

Here's the biggest reason why - GameStop CEO Ryan Cohen gets a performance pay if the market cap goes up: > The total award consists of stock options to purchase 171,537,327 shares of the Company's Class A common stock at a price of $20.66 per share. Tranche Award% Market Cap Hurdle EBITDA Hurdle 1 10% $20 Billion $2.0 Billion 2 10% $30 Billion $3.0 Billion 3 10% $40 Billion $4.0 Billion 4 10% $50 Billion $5.0 Billion 5 10% $60 Billion $6.0 Billion 6 10% $70 Billion $7.0 Billion 7 10% $80 Billion $8.0 Billion 8 15% $90 Billion $9.0 Billion 9 15% $100 Billion $10.0 Billion Swallowing a new company, even if it takes on debt, can bump this up. eBay market cap is $48B. https://investor.gamestop.com/news-releases/news-details/202...

avonmach

Seems like a no brainer for people who want to go into a physical store without dealing with the hassle of waiting for the item to sell along with packaging and shipping.

xnx

A marketing stunt just like when (and I'm reluctant to use their name) Perplexity said it would buy Chrome.

Imustaskforhelp

alternative link on archive.org using htmlpipe[0] : https://web.archive.org/web/20260512164713/http://serjaimela... Kind reminder to donate to archive.org: https://archive.org/donate This helps because google captcha now sometimes require android phone qr code scanning etc. so I have uploaded the article on archive.org [0]: I am creator of htmlpipe which archives archive.is pages on archive.org (I was gonna add it as a comment below bstsb but it seems to have been detached now so can't comment on it)

pluc

GameStop forgot to pivot to AI-first before making the offer.

arealaccount

> Cohen last week offered $125 a share — consisting of 50% cash and 50% GameStop stock So he's basically looking to launder his freshly minted meme stonks into legitimate real company stock. It's shocking they don't want it.

taffydavid

I thought gamestop was in financial trouble a few years back, how can they afford 56 billion?

gigatexal

.... and the sky is blue, news at 11. of course the offer wasn't serious. did anyone see the interview GameStop CEO did with Andrew Ross Sorkin? he clearly didn't have the money and was trying to gaslight the world.

cestith

If eBay really wanted to sell itself, I’d propose a no reserve auction with the bids starting at $420.

Topgamer7

The eBay AstroTurf in this thread is real. eBay is a hot piece of garbage, just go watch testimonials of sellers getting ripped off with no recourse. That being said I don't really care whether either end of the sale goes through.

duxup

Nice to see one of those heavily leveraged deals turned down.