Felix Salmon Says GameStop’s $54 Billion eBay Bid Is Mostly a Stunt. Ryan Cohen Wins Either Way.

Felix Salmon called Ryan Cohen’s bid for eBay largely posturing dressed up as M&A. The math agrees. GameStop (NYSE:GME | GME Price Prediction) carries a market cap of roughly $10.25 billion and is offering $125 per eBay share in a 50% cash, 50% stock structure that would require something like $28 billion in cash against $9 billion on the balance sheet. Cohen secured a highly confident letter from TD Bank for $20 billion in financing, which is non-binding and doesn’t really mean very much. GameStop’s offer was recently rejected by eBay (NASDAQ:EBAY), but it doesn’t matter.

The math that makes this a stunt

Funding the stock half would force GameStop to issue, by the panel’s estimate, four times the amount of stock currently outstanding, which Slate Money called the most dilutive acquisition we’ve seen in years. Cohen has signaled equity issuance, and the market understood the implication. GME fell by double digits after the announcement. Meanwhile, Polymarket traders price the probability of an actual acquisition at just 21.5% on $355,784 of volume.

Why Cohen wins either way

eBay has run hard. Shares are up 56% over the past year and 24% year to date through May 8. GameStop already owns just under 5% of eBay stock plus options, so every dollar the bid adds to eBay’s price is a dollar of mark-to-market profit for the bidder. The offer itself, priced at a 46% premium to February’s unaffected price, is its own catalyst. Despite eBay declining, Cohen has goosed the value of an existing position.

Collectibles climbed to 33.1% of GameStop’s Q4 net sales, and Pokemon-card flippers live on eBay. Pair that with eBay’s 135 million active buyers and a Depop acquisition aimed at recommerce, and a story emerges. eBay already produced $11.1 billion of full-year revenue against GameStop’s $3.63 billion, and CEO Jamie Iannone has been selling steadily, including 10,605 shares at $109.17 on May 4. That is the behavior of an executive harvesting a rally before any defense becomes necessary.

What the balance sheet really says

Strip away the headline number and GameStop’s actual transformation is on the balance sheet, not the income statement. The company sits on $9 billion in cash and securities after raising about $4.2 billion through 0% convertible notes, with long-term debt that surged to $4.16 billion from $9.6 million a year earlier. A special warrant dividend announced in September 2025, covering 59 million warrants at a $32.00 exercise price, could raise another $1.9 billion before it expires October 30, 2026. That is the war chest Cohen is really wielding, and he could deploy it to buy companies other than eBay if there’s an opportunity.

What investors should take from this

Sentiment on Reddit spiked bullish on announcement day, then collapsed to a bearish score of 32 to 38 by May 11, with the most-upvoted thread asking how a company with $10 billion in assets and $4 billion debt offers to buy one trading at $50 billion. You can read the Q4 release and reach the same conclusion: core retail revenue keeps shrinking, with Q4 sales down 13.9% year over year to $1.10 billion, even as gross margin expanded to 35.0% from 28.3%. Cohen has built an option on chaos. For long-horizon investors, GME remains a speculative trade attached to a CEO whose mixed record in turnarounds just got more interesting and no safer. The eBay bid does not change that calculus.