GameStop Preparing Offer for eBay

https://www.wsj.com/business/deals/gamestop-preparing-offer-for-ebay-1678e6de

by voisin • 3 months ago

83 63 3 months ago

wsj.com

love2read• 3 months ago

Bed Bath and Beyond preparing offer for Costco /s

huhkerrf• 3 months ago

Time ticks for everyone... One day some company will be buying the remains of Amazon.

applfanboysbgon3• 3 months ago

GameStop, which had a market value of around $11 billion [...] EBay is several times GameStop’s size, with a market value around $45 billion as of Friday’s close.
Details of the potential offer for eBay couldn’t be learned.

This appears to be an attention stunt, of which Cohen has done a few since GME became a meme stock.

voisin• 3 months ago

Not necessarily a stunt if they’ve taken a meaningful stake. Smaller companies can acquire larger ones. Market cap reflects equity, not enterprise value. If the target has low debt, the deal can be financed with borrowing. The 1980s LBO wave, led by Michael Milken, is a clear precedent.

Esophagus4• 3 months ago

I’ve searched the net to find the example, but I remember this happening during the dot com era too…

Some unknown tiny company made an offer to takeover Yahoo (or some similar company)… the tiny company made headlines for a moment then disappeared again.

It was an example of dot com silliness.

Can’t for the life of me remember, and Google can’t seem to either.

c-c-c-c-c• 3 months ago

Similar to when koenigsegg attempted to purchase saab, it can be a great way to get publicity.

iknowSFR• 3 months ago

Maybe but we have a recent sample of Paramount ($12b) acquiring WB ($62b).

applfanboysbgon3• 3 months ago

That would be more accurately described as Larry Ellison (~$200b) acquiring WB.

sanswork• 3 months ago

In that case though Paramount offloaded 25% to foreign wealth funds and had Larry Ellison willing to provide guarantee on(according to google) almost $50b of debt.

Ryan Cohen is rich but he's not that rich.

aurareturn3• 3 months ago

Besides the Larry Ellison, Trump, and Middle East backing, Paramount and WB's businesses have synergy.

Gamestop and eBay have no synergy. Gamestop can't possibly run eBay better than eBay's current management. It's a meme stock looking to make noise so they can get a higher stock price, and then unload their shares onto the public market to raise cash.

GME has 3x'ed their shares outstanding since Covid.

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/GME/gamestop/share...

CSMastermind• 3 months ago

KMart famously aquired the much larger Sears (and then destroyed it)

weard_beard2• 3 months ago

The attention stunts were a strategy toward finding profitability for the core GME business model.

This is significantly different, in line with a strategy that seems to have been in place since he became CEO of Gamestop.

This appears to be an attempt to take over eBay the same way he took over Gamestop by acquiring a 51% controlling interest with capital he will raise by further diluting the value of Gamestop shares.

It appears long term he is trying to build the, "Amazon of the secondhand market".

Triphibian• 3 months ago

I remember showing up to buy a new Call of Duty game on release day, back when physical was the only way to buy games and seeing tons of people with boxes full of old games and consoles. I realized then that GameStop's differentiation from other retailers was that it was also a kind of pawn shop.

semperdark• 3 months ago

However GameStop does have like $9 billion in cash on hand if I recall correctly.

JumpCrisscross• 3 months ago

To be clear, if GameStop has no intent or ability to do the things they’re saying they’re going to do, as a public company in respect of another, that’s all kinds of securities fraud and shareholder-lawsuit catnip.

Put another way, if you think this is fake you could make a lot of money. Because that would mean GameStop is de facto offering the market a free put on its own and eBay’s stock.

aurareturn3• 3 months ago

This probably would have been investigated in the 2010s. Since covid, security fraud seems to be rampant.

Gamestop is just in the business of selling their shares to retail. It's pretty much like a crypto shitcoin.

v4dm3• 3 months ago

Ryan Cohen rarely does interviews & Lauren Thomas is one of the few journalists he agreed to speak to, they had an interview earlier this year - https://www.wsj.com/finance/stocks/gamestop-ceo-plans-e8440c...

If you check eBay & GME's stock prices after the announcement, the market seems to think there are at least serious discussions here if not more.

surgical_fire2• 3 months ago

GME stock price is not really a reliable metric for measuring the seriousness of anything.

v4dm3• 3 months ago

...because you decided so?

afavour• 3 months ago

Does “the market” not mean meme stock investors in this instance though?

v4dm3• 3 months ago

Headline-driven market is a thing, not sure why meme stock investors are part of this? How are they connected to this news?

Also, what's a meme stock? How would you define that?

mattbrewsbytes• 3 months ago

If you want to look at facts (these come from yahoo finance): 36% of their stock is held by institutions, another ~9% by insiders. Ebay is 95% held by institutions (that sounds insane but I don't follow markets, maybe its normal) and it went up 11% yesterday. That sounds like institutional traders think this is real, right? Ebay is at or near an all time high so why would anyone want to buy at an all time high? Maybe this is a pump and dump on ebay by Wall St? Get retail traders hyped, your stock bumps 10% or more, then dump shares.

I don't understand how a smaller publicly traded company can buy a larger publicly traded company. Don't they need to have a majority of shares or enough to demand a board seat? A deal like that probably needs to have outside investors and/or some leverage of some kind.

underlipton• 3 months ago

That depends on what you mean by "meme stock investors". Retail probably doesn't move an $11 billion market cap company 7% over the 5 hours BEFORE the WSJ article drops. Institutional investors trading on Gamestop's volatility might, though. There are other options, too, but those get into unpopular conspiracy theories and I don't want to nuke my karma.

adammarples• 3 months ago

"the market" that moves gme stock is a meme subreddit but yes

lofaszvanitt• 3 months ago

so price manipulation

estimator7292• 3 months ago

Best I can do is three dollars

SMAAART• 3 months ago

History rhymes, same playbook as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MCI_Inc.

phplovesong• 3 months ago

LOL. Ebay is like 50-100x bigger than memestock. This is fake news, or just some bs some ceo said drunk.

neilv3• 3 months ago

Whatever you do, don't break eBay.

I love eBay, for both buying and selling used items that are viable to ship.

We let CraigsList get broken, with seemingly much fewer sellers and buyers than it used to have.

I tried Facebook Marketplace, which is where most local buyers&sellers seemed to move to. But I won't install their app, and the notification emails only sometimes came through. (One buyer became very irate when I didn't respond promptly.) Also, their pretend E2E encryption for messages on their Web site was just annoying (like a dark pattern intended to make people hate E2E, while not actually providing any significant security).

sethops1• 3 months ago

eBay has been a savior for me buying for buying old / replacement parts. No idea where some of these sellers get their inventory but I'm so glad they exist and we can both use eBay to transact.

qingcharles3• 3 months ago

If only eBay would fix their search. In the old days the search modifiers actually did what you think they should do. It's been broken for over 20 years now.

neilv3• 3 months ago

What search modifiers? I regularly use minus, double-quotes, and parentheses, and they all work well for me.

The main thing I dislike about eBay search is all the sponsored placements violating the sorting order. For example, if you sort on increasing price, sponsored placements not in the specified sorting order litter that heavily, making it hard to follow. Amazon searches have the same problem. (Problem, from the perspective of buyer-on-the-marketplace.)

The other thing I dislike about both eBay and Amazon searches is the spamming of huge numbers of listings for essentially the same item. I notice it more on Amazon than eBay.

mortsnort• 3 months ago

This would of course negatively impact eBay because it would now be saddled with immense debt. To pay this debt, there would be mass layoffs leading to a decline in customer service, quality and innovation.

Deals like this benefit nobody but shareholders (in the short term) and lenders. The workers at the companies get laid off, consumers get worse products, and the odds of bankruptcy spike. Leveraged buyouts seem like a net negative to society.

xtiansimon• 3 months ago

”Whatever you do, don't break eBay. […] Facebook Marketplace, which is where most local buyers&sellers seemed to move to.”

I too actually rely on eBay as an alternative to _every other online store_.

It’s curious you mention facebook and eBay together. I find FBMP completely unusable because of what their search feature returns—garbage. It functions like their whole platform by trying to grab your attention with things it thinks you might want (how else to interpret unrelated results?) but didn’t ask for.

Despite eBay hobbling their search feature by removing Boolean operators, I find the two platforms couldn’t be more different.

TiredOfLife• 3 months ago

First thing gamestop did when they bought Impulse (digital game distribution service) is make it US only.

xiphmont• 3 months ago

Oh no. Please, please don't let eBay get Boeing'd.

satvikpendem• 3 months ago

I wonder how those bagholders are feeling now, still diamond hands holding to the moon? Hell, there are still Bed Bath and Beyond and even Sears bagholders somehow thinking they'll get back money from a bankrupt and dissolved company, so I can't be too surprised.

https://reddit.com/gallery/1t1aeky

tim-tday2• 3 months ago

“Best I can do is $1.25 not a lot of demand for used” <squints at the package> “online marketplace sites.”

phendrenad2• 3 months ago

Probably a good time to scrape eBay and collect all of the seller ratings in a big Excel file before GameStop knows what's happening. There will be a market for an EBay that isn't pushing you to buy Pokemon cards or Funko Pops every 5 seconds, but you need that list.

bookofjoe• 3 months ago

https://www.wsj.com/business/deals/gamestop-preparing-offer-...

giannicmptr1000• 3 months ago

ebay is the worst, they might as well buy shein

fHr• 3 months ago

This is so fucking retarded but the k(etamine) market will say sure that makes sense pump and dump it and quants will make millions.

4b11b4• 3 months ago

There's no way GameStop is buying eBay... This is noise.

eBay is actually a competent engineering organization

GameStop Preparing Offer for eBay

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