How do you celebrate a memestock trying to buy a company four times its size? You make memes, of course.
On Sunday, GameStop’s CEO, Ryan Cohen, made an unsolicited offer to buy internet retailer eBay for about $56 billion. GameStop has a market cap of about $11 billion, compared with eBay’s $46 billion.
“EBay should be worth — and will be worth — a lot more money,” Cohen told The Wall Street Journal on Sunday. “I’m thinking about turning eBay into something worth hundreds of billions of dollars.”
Cohen, who joined the company in 2023, said he wanted the company to become a “legit competitor” to Amazon.
On Sunday, GameStop said it was offering to buy eBay for $125 per share, with 50% in stock and 50% in cash. Cohen said GameStop has built a 5% stake in the company and would be willing to take the offer directly to shareholders if eBay were not receptive to the proposal.
EBay did not respond to a request for comment from Business Insider, sent outside standard business hours.
GameStop, which sells physical games and hardware, has been grappling with store closures as more people shift toward digital downloads and streaming. An eBay takeover could mark a second surprising revival for GameStop.
It was a major winner in the meme-stock mania of January 2021, which involved throngs of retail investors using the trading app Robinhood to buy stocks.
Here are the internet’s best reactions to the news of GameStop offering to buy eBay:
