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

233 points by voisin

by bstsb

0 subcomment

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

by qrush

6 subcomments

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.

by tombert

5 subcomments

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.

by pluc

1 subcomments

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

by xnx

2 subcomments

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

by taffydavid

5 subcomments

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

by avonmach

5 subcomments

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.

by cmiles8

8 subcomments

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.

by JKCalhoun

0 subcomment

I had the sense this was never a serious, newsworthy story. Just a wild boast that somehow got clicks.

by cestith

0 subcomment

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

0 subcomment

by arealaccount

0 subcomment

> 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.

by SwellJoe

4 subcomments

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

by duxup

0 subcomment

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

by Imustaskforhelp

0 subcomment

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)

by echelon

2 subcomments

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...

by gedy

1 subcomments

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

by gigatexal

0 subcomment

.... 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.

by Topgamer7

1 subcomments

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.