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.
I buy and sell through eBay about once a month and I agree. eBay isn't perfect but over several hundred transactions and a few disputes that were settled fairly I've had a good experience. I know it's possible to have a bad experience and I'm not discounting those stories, but it's not the standard eBay experience.
GameStop was trying to do a Private Equity style takeover. Everyone hates it when PE companies do that, but GameStop is an lol memestock so that fact was overlooked with all of the to the moon comments. I do not want any platform I use being taken over by in a highly leveraged takeover, especially not by GameStop.
I've had two disputes that materially ignored the facts of the dispute, in one case where even the buyer said he didn't and wouldn't do as agreed, and still won, costing me $700+.
You can't say "I've had a few disputes that were handled fairly, so when other people say there's weren't, that's not the standard eBay experience".
> You can't say "I've had a few disputes that were handled fairly, so when other people say there's weren't, that's not the standard eBay experience"
I did not say that. I specifically said I know some people have bad experiences, but that I don't. Please don't fake-quote things that someone didn't say.
I acknowledge that some people have bad experiences and some people (like you) can be extra unlucky, but I wouldn't say that your bad experiences are the standard eBay experience. Logically, if everyone was losing money like that all over the platform nobody would be selling there any more.
If getting scammed is the standard eBay seller experience, surely you'd have heard about it before deciding to sell? I've been selling on ebay for years and I've never had a dispute. Having very few, high value sales is sort of a red flag for scams. If you don't have a lot of prior positive feedback maybe that's why you lost your disputes?
I've sold on eBay for over 20 years and millions of dollars. I would like to know more about your experience as a seller where you had disputes handled poorly, especially one that cost you $700?
I'm not the commenter, but about 20 years ago when ebay owned paypal still, I sold 26 iPod nanos in a big sale on ebay. Everyone received theirs except one guy, and the tracking showed the shipper lost it, in that the package just stopped being scanned in the USPS system halfway through. He complained, completely understandable! eBay froze my account, froze the payments for all 26, and I never saw the money ever again.
They wouldn't let me just refund the one customer. I had to prove the other 25 were delivered, so I did that. Then I had to prove they actually got iPods, so I linked them to the reviewed transactions that showed people were happy with the iPods. So then I had to prove my identity to eBay. They wanted my license, so I did that. Then a utility so I sent my light bill. Then my phone bill. Then my natural gas bill. Then my lease. Then they asked for my passport, which I did not have at that time. Suddenly nothing could be done without the passport, and they'd keep the money for 180 days and then mail me a check. Except then they said they were keeping the money anyway because I didn't provide a passport. Five grand, gone.
From that day on I'd have multiple eBay accounts at all times, spread things out around them so that when (not if, when) they would freeze an account for a review, I'd just cancel everything, refund whatever purchase was in review, and never use that account again. I learned that the review process is just a delay process to make you think there was progress when you'd already been banned but since you thought there was a chance, you'd keep busy in the no-go queue for however long you interacted with the bot before you gave up rather than calling support.
Ok. I've been through that, though it is a function of Paypal. You can absolutely recover the funds from a limited account. 20 years later, I would still pursue this. In fact, if you aren't able to log in I would check with the unclaimed property division of the state your account was registered in when you had the account. PayPal and eBay are publicly traded fully audited companies, there is no, we just get to keep the money scenario.
I sold a Mavic 2 Pro drone with 5 batteries. The whole process was a mess. Scammer initially complained that it didn't come with a CrystalSky tablet that was in one picture (that was only added AFTER after he had bid already and asked to see Flight Logs, and was explicitly disclaimed as not being a part of the package, nor was it in the receipts I sent the buyer). After pointing out those details, silence.
Then, three weeks later:
"The batteries don't work. I want a refund."
"Batteries? Any of them? All of them?"
"All of them, none work. I want a refund."
Note that two of the batteries were less than 4 months old, still in warranty.
He then stated he wanted a refund of $800. For five brand-new batteries, that would only be $670.
No evidence was shown, despite multiple requests (like a video of a battery on a charger, or on the drone, failing to power up). I stated I'd like to get the original batteries back, as at least I'd be able to get them replaced under warranty or possibly repaired and recoup some of my money (I was skeptical there was -any- issue, but still, good faith). He "happily" agreed. I asked him to send me a message on eBay (so it was tracked and not avoiding their system) acknowledging that offering a partial refund was contingent on his sending me the batteries back and that he accepts me disputing the refund if not.
He sends a message indicating all of the above.
Refund is sent (for about $700, to include his return shipping costs).
Thirty-five minutes later, I get a message, "USPS says they don't ship damaged batteries, so I will not be returning them". (35 minutes? So what, you were just sitting around waiting for the refund, and then the very moment I sent the money, you jumped in your car, got to the post office, had this discussion, got home, and were able to send me this message? When your home address shows you about 15 minutes from the nearest post office?)
I then suggest we meet in person to exchange them (I live a few hours away, not convenient, but still, $700...). He umms and ahhs, "How will I be able to prove that I gave them to you in person?". I suggest we do it in a police station and point out that his local PD even welcomes people to use their lobby for CL, etc. on their website. More umms and ahhs. "I need to contact eBay support to see if they allow this." I point him to eBay's specific FAQ page describing exactly this and how they recommend doing in person sales, and refunds, documentation thereof, and how they support it. But he ignores that and says, "I never heard back from eBay support, so I'm not sure what to do". I point this page out again, and he goes silent.
I opened a dispute. No evidence was provided for damage or faulty goods, referenced the multiple requests for video, or of anything.) Multiple instances of the buyer trying to show something was problematic with the listing, not abiding by the agreement and refusing/avoiding any method of returning damaged items.
Overnight, no further inquiries.
"We have closed your dispute. Based on our review, the buyer is entitled to keep the partial refund for damage. He is also not required to return the damaged items".
So he ended up with a Mavic 2 Pro, with less than 20 hours flight time, 5 batteries, for in the order of $950, all told.
Sorry that happened, scammers are the worst. Yeah unfortunately here the refund being sent proactively was the issue and eBay isn't really able to recoup those funds. Ex: the buyer used a credit card, you refund and it goes back to his card on the original authorization. Your dispute can't go anywhere because eBay isn't able to just reauthorize the buyers card without their consent.
Yeah that's what a primary source is: words from a principal architect of the deal, not a vague description using emotionally-charged terms. The interviewer is a professional eBay seller, so I think lots of what's mentioned in the interview is relevant to much of the discussion in this thread.
If you were interested in learning more about the nuance of the situation you might appreciate the information therein, but you're also free to reply to anyone who provides alternate perspectives or additional information with silly labels like 'true believer' instead of addressing the content of their messages!
If they would just put the search back to how it was (deterministic) so it would do exactly what you ask for, not one of these modern searches where it kinda bubbles up a few items, but the rest is all random sorta-maybe like what you asked.
They market pretty heavily in growth markets. They're really heavy in advertising in the UK and Europe. There's a lot of digital remarketing they do in the US.
It's about the brand. Ehen shopping online, everyone may have heard of eBay, but how many people are going to go there first, as opposed to Amazon, Etsy, AliExpress, Temu, wherever else. And yes, eBay is going to have the weird eBay stuff, but if users don't even think to go looking there, they've lost a sale.
Legitimately millions of people. It also depends on the item but Amazon has been worse than eBay in my experience since at least the pandemic. AliExpress and Temu have some overlap to eBay but also offer a different consistency of experience.
As one data point, if I want something new, I go Amazon first and eBay second. If I want something used, I go to eBay first. My search usually ends there, but if I can't find it there, I probably have to go to a specialty forum.
Even for bootleg stuff (mostly long out of print arcade hardware), eBay is pretty much on par with AliExpress.
Exactly, especially if they have to immediately start repaying $10's of billions in debt that GameStop wanted to put them in. Whole thing is just dumb of the CEO.
Not parent, if you want to sell an old original video game you know has value, it's either the proper collector channel (slow, super involved, higher pay), the generic resale channels (fast, no effort, lowest amount possible) or ebay (relatively fast, a bit involved but not too much, pay depends on how good you defined the product).
I had some old stuff around that Mr everyday might find (eg pristine original Gameboy Pokémon cartridge without box), and quick resale would give me 10 euro, involved resale would ask me hours and hours of work ebay allowed me to sale for 120+euro spending 1h on the description and picture (to show the scratch etc).
Another case is "oh you have the msi ge77vx4 laotop and you look for the plastic keyboard map in azerty? You can pay a 500e rma if they even allow it or buy the piece for 20e on ebay and fix it yourself"
Ymmv but it has a specific place that no one really have right now
(a) used books. As a Midwesterner I love that can directly order specific technology books (the ones everyone recommends), literally from a Goodwill in San Francisco, for the price of a good meal
(b) dodging Amazon co-mingling of inventory. Do I trust Amazon doing whatever it wants in a warehouse, or some eBay seller with a few years of built-up-reputation to lose but who specializes in the part I want? Let me tell you I have gotten a lot more handwritten thank-you-for-your-purchase notes from eBay sellers than Amazon. 3D printer parts, used computers+parts for the homelab, laser printer replacement parts, etc.
(Yes Amazon said they would stop recently... Not sure I believe it's fixed yet)
Sorry, a bit cheeky but if you are regularly buying old computer hardware then you are collecting.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with it. I still have my ZX Spectrum 48k, Atari ST and the Archimedes my parent acquired when the school was dumping them for PCs.
I was selling NES/SNES games + boxes. After ~2 years of sporadic sales, I ended up just offloading them to a guy who has a huge used games outpost at a flea market.
I buy a mix of things: clothes, watches, and usually tiles from my favorite pottery in Michigan: Pewabic.
I backed into my garage stupidly and broke my RAV4's side mirror. I found a guy in Japan who was selling the exact part I needed (the cover for the mirror matching my paint color), OEM for $50. It's like Craigslist but global on eBay. Never change.
I frequently buy project car stuff on Ebay. You can find OE stuff with the part numbers scratched off that must have "fallen off the assembly line" pretty easily. Easily a few items per month between that and computer parts!
I use them to buy refurbished enterprise machines -- laptops & mini PCs, books and DVDs/BluRays. Works pretty well actually, never had any issues with the quality as long as you stick to reputed sellers.
There's a lot of low volume and niche stuff sold by industrial ecommerce (grainger, Mcmaster, etc) and sites specializing in a given niche that those sellers cross list to eBay (the higher volume stuff is typically sold on Amazon)
I'm the same way as OP. I'll go clean out my basement, find a load of old tech and just put it up in a bundle or sell it individually for dirt cheap. Likewise, I buy a lot of stuff like minimal wallets, micro-electronics like charging cables, dongles for my work laptop, phone cases. Just typically a lot of knick knacks or older tech stuff. There's a booming economy for old walkmans and cd players. Same thing with higher end audio stuff like older DAC's, speakers, amps. A lot of unique stuff you can't find on Amazon or elsewhere.
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.
The TD Bank securities commitment of 20B to finance the deal and GameStop having a market cap far below the acquisition cost suggests that buying eBay would’ve been very problematic and risky for investors. But comparing it to K mart buying sears isn’t really accurate to me.
Like yeah, GameStop clearly fits into the death of retail, and acquiring eBay does increase their market visibility or presence. Beyond that, what ebay/GS could’ve gained is way different and arguably more substantial than what acquiring Sears did for either company involved. Atleast here, one operates storefronts for second hand transactions and the other expressly doesn’t. There is definitely money in that.
If eBay thought having storefronts would be advantageous, they would have them. It doesn't make a lot of sense for eBay to merge with Gamestop only for the combined entity to decide that the most sensible first thing to do is close all the Gamestop locations.
The physical Gamestop locations are also horrifically overprovisioned to be an eBay storefront. Many companies have already experimented with things like "lockers" which seem to be successful enough to hang around, probably because the costs are low enough they don't need to do much to justify themselves and they don't need dedicated store fronts. If they want better assurance that the things being shipped are what the sellers claim they are a partnership with UPS or Fedex and their wide variety of existing storefronts that are already provisioned with everything you need to ship almost anything makes orders of magnitude more sense, and nobody has to "acquire" the other to make that work, without the square footage of a Gamestop location.
GameStop's idea behind using their physical locations isn't for ease of shipping so much as ease of verification. People buying brand-name stuff off eBay (and Vinted, etc) pay for verification services to make sure that it's real. The idea - which is the only good/sane part of this entire takeover proposal - is to have retail locations that do the verification in person instead of shipping items to a central location for verification on sale.
But if eBay thought that would bring in more sales, I doubt it would be hard to find empty retail outlets in every city/town in the US and Europe since high street retail has been on a death spiral for years.
You can already use lockers for delivery/drop off with eBay through their courier company partners, at least in the UK.
Wouldn't verification for almost anything beyond the extremely basic need specialized people? I don't think it's reasonable to train every Gamestop employee to be able to verify everything from fancy Swiss watches to brand name clothing to playing cards. At least if you do it in a central location you can have actual experts do the verification.
Yup, you save a few dollars per verification on shipping in exchange for spending tens of thousands on training each employee to verify items. Mind you these are retail employees so turnover is going to be high. Also since they need to be able to verify everything they won't have time to be in store since they'll constantly need to be studying new products. That or you just have them work off checklists for each product in which case the value of the verification isn't great since counterfeiters will just buy those check lists and manufacture to them.
The end result is much much higher cost per verification, and a less trusted quality of verification. But you save a few bucks on shipping.
The verification I'd be looking for immediately in-store would be "is this [product] or is this a brick?" - that once happened to me, with (for all I see sellers complain about excessively buyer-friendly policies) no recourse or compensation. If there's a more-complicated verification needed, the buyer could request that it be held onto until that's performed (elsewhere, if necessary). Verifiable chain of custody protects both buyers and sellers.
Not that a dodgy Gamestop merger is necessary for this, but I'd be (much) more likely to both buy and sell on eBay if it existed.
I'm not sure I follow/buy the premise of moving second-hand sales to a physical building as beneficial to eBay.
If I'm looking for X, I'd much rather go to an online store, where I have access to several listings of X at varying prices and condition, vs. make a trip to a physical store, see if they have X, and hope that the condition and price matches my expectations.
Maybe if I'm not looking for X, and just want to browse a bunch of stuff (e.g. yardsale/flea market style), then a physical store could make sense.
But, to me, having this middle-man physical presence was already a problem, and eBay solved this.
I just don't feel like eBay needs GameStop.
Now, whether GameStop needs eBay is a different story. But GameStop is in trouble for two reasons:
1. Video games -- and therefore video game sales -- are moving to digital.
2. Physical stores are becoming a thing of the past for retail transactions.
I could see it potentially be something like the Walmart pickup service? Last mile delivery is pretty expensive, so conceivably they could offer faster and/or cheaper shipping if you picked it up at a physical store.
I don't know. I don't think this acquisition would be a good idea.
^This. The crazy part is that in today’s PE-style system of things, the incentives…
- GameStop shareholders
- GameStop the company - e.g. employees
- eBay shareholders
- eBay the company - for example its employees
…aren’t necessarily aligned.
If GAME buys EBAY - it’s an exit for the EBAY shareholders, which is easy for them to evaluate as it’s presumably a $ premium over the share price today. If GAME then runs the company into the ground trying to free up the cash to pay off the acquisition debt, as most leveraged buyouts do (especially where retail is involved), that’s not a problem for those already-exited shareholders, though it is probably a problem for employees of either company.
My understanding is that existing Ebay shareholders would get half cash and half stock. In order to actually profit, those shareholders would need to believe that the combined company's stock could be sold off without taking a significant loss.
If this deal does eventually go through, then it might be a good time for someone to start working on a competitor to take over the online auction space.
That's what those huge ~10% final value fees they charge are for. And other revenue such as sponsored listings (pay to boost your item in search results).
As long as they keep the fraud volume below like 5% of sales, I feel like it's just a numbers game, where they just need to get as much sales onto their platform as possible to give them enough operating margin to cover their costs (including fraud) and provide profit.
Admittely, I have no idea how well they're doing at that, I haven't looked at their financial statements or anything.
Yeah my main point was it's a complete pain in the ass to deal with if you want to do it properly in a way that actually prevents fraud on either side. eBay has kind of just erred one side or the other for most of it's existence and right now the complaints are mostly from the seller side that I see.
I guess that’s why the Amazon model works: if you warehouse and deliver, then you cut out a lot of the fraud.
Sellers gotta deliver one way or another anyway so building out that logistics doesn’t add much friction to the whole process at scale. If things turnover quickly enough, the first mile benefits exceed the warehousing expense.
Amazon's return policy is also getting pretty bad. There's a lot more third party sellers on the platform and occasionally users sent incorrect items get their refund refused because "item not returned" which is extremely frustrating when it happens. They're also kicking more people off for returning large numbers of items.
And as to GME trying to shift to that they did attempt that already, it was one of RC's first attempts at pivoting back in 2022, they added something like a million square feet of warehouse and fulfillment and it didn't really work.
The letter also said it was conditional on the combined entity maintaining investment-grade credit rating, which seems unlikely if the combined entity was saddled with $20B in debt.
K mart is at the very minimum a viable business. GameStop is a meme stock attached to the brand of a moribund business model. I just don't see a world where GameStop's core business ever gains relevance again when gamers have shown a strong revealed preference for digital games over physical ones.
This proposal never made any sense and it speaks volumes about the lunacy of the market that anyone takes it seriously at all.
Gamestop turning into an eBay storefront makes a lot of sense to me and this seemed to be a very rational step to take when the short squeeze anomaly left them with billions in the bank and a business model that no longer makes very much sense with physical game sales being eaten by digital-only sales along with the potential decline of the console.
They already have the position of used buying and sales, extending that into in store receiving and listing of items on eBay makes sense. eBay being in decline as well.
I've yet to see a convincing vision of what an eBay physical store looks like that doesn't kind of boil down to a UPS store. The vast majority of their business comes from 3rd party listings and the only real stock they have and sell are in the eBay refurbished line. I'm really not convinced of what a successful eBay store would even be there for.
I've seen some say for authentication but staffing employees able to perform that authentication at even a fraction of existing GameStop stores would be extremely expensive (unless it's terrible authentication) so it again devolves to basically being a UPS store but for eBay shipping items out to be authenticated. Similar to what GameStop does with Pokemon cards and PSA grading except you can't really slab a Rolex or handbag so the authentication is only good so long as the good remains in the hands of the authenticator.
The only small service I think they could offer is a way for sellers to certify what's being shipped to avoid contests, but having that in every GameStop store is also very expensive for a cost they currently just shift onto sellers by siding with the customer. eBay could easily implement that if they wanted by partnering with UPS stores or a program where sellers video the packing or something.
That's kind of but not really what GameStop was before digital games took over and isn't what eBay is. A majority of Pawn Shop business is in the name pawns and neither eBay nor GameStop have ever done.
> They could build AI to help authentication and just identifying sellers would help tremendously with fraud.
That's a huge step beyond reasonable, there have been billions spent on the current AIs and none of them are up to the task of telling a good fake from a real item. Maybe one day but that's ages away.
And fraud doesn't just happen on the seller side, a big headache for sellers is buyer fraud where they'll claim the item is wrong/broken and there's almost no recourse for sellers to prove that's incorrect. eBay could just as easily partner with UPS stores to implement seller and buyer authentication anyways there's not a huge benefit to GameStop in particular being the partner there. It's always been an option and they haven't taken it.
I think you’re right about Kmart/Sears, though the interesting thing was that Lampert was correct that Sears had a great deal of real estate which had tremendous value. If someone skilled at retail had bought it, they could have used the money from selling some of that, to fix the business. Of course, Lampert was only skilled at finance and RE and very obviously just planned to gently wind down the business while selling off its assets, which is much less risky to do than fixing it - and may have yielded better financial results anyway.
That’s why the popular perception is that the Kmart transaction and Lampert killed it, even though their lot had really been cast 15+ years before, when they stopped innovating, and really stopped investing in their stores completely, without getting serious about e-commerce either. That poisoned their brand, which made it really hard to imagine turning it around.
Sears and Kmart both did so much diversification in the ~1980s! Discover, Allstate insurance, Dean Witter, Coldwell Banker for Sears (and Kmart had bought Borders, Builders Square, PACE, OfficeMax). If you trace the total return to a holder of Sears stock c. 1980, including the value they would have received in terms of stock in the spinoffs, the shareholders themselves may have actually ended up doing quite well in our timeline, even compared to one where Sears had reinvested all their profits into Sears, Roebuck & Co and maintained a more dominant retailing business as a result. It seems like no one really cared if the core business succeeded or failed, though.
I agree that if GameStop were basically rebranded as eBay brick and mortar stores, that might work. I guess I just feel like if it were GameStop itself that were managing it then it would be unlikely to actually work.
It's not like digital storefronts are new; I think GameStop should have been pivoting the moment that Steam started getting traction.
You guys might not have seen the recent interviews (last week) with gamestop CEO Ryan Cohen. Gamestop has already pivoted, game and console sales are cyclical and hard to base a business upon. They have leaned hard into collectables as a way to expand their business and retail model.
I am unsure how a Gamestop/eBay storefront would do. Physical manifestations of "eBay stores" have existed in the past and none of them did very well long term.
Dunno how gamestop’s logistics works but they could leverage the existing shops as dropoff points for sellers and offer a pickup point option to bypass the postal system. eBay sellers are at a disadvantage vs Amazon warehouse sellers when it comes to shipping costs.
At least my shipping broker in Canada uses small retail stores as dropoff points and then has a network of gig courier delivery companies they send stuff to for last mile delivery. Saves a lot on shipping costs.
I’ve noticed they don’t really integrate with gig couriers for last mile US shipments, just a few consolidators for mid-mile (eg: UPS Mail Innovations that uses USPS for last mile)
Might further delay delivery times but I use eBay to save some dollars in exchange for delayed gratification.
I don’t know about everybody else but I both sell and buy on eBay items that are more niche but not totally bespoke like on Etsy (e.g. photography equipment or specific hats).
Which means an eBay store would never make sense for my type of buyer or seller because I would just go to one of the many other existing entrenched retailers for regular things.
I know eBay pushes hard for regular retail but ultimately I see it as a marketplace for less fungible items and that’s what it excels at. Regular retail for regular items is easier because the user experience is always standard.
GameStop is trying to sit in the middle and trying to move product that is a little more fungible (previously used games and now more trading cards and collectibles) but I just don’t know how big of a market it is when you have to factor brick and mortar upkeep. I don’t want them to take down eBay in an experiment.
>I am unsure how a Gamestop/eBay storefront would do. Physical manifestations of "eBay stores" have existed in the past and none of them did very well long term.
A key here I think is the easy gradual transition here because Gamestop already has the used games business they could slowly integrate that into listing used games on eBay that were received at stores and then add related categories step by step with collectables and consumer electronics. There'd also be options of ebay items delivered to store which increases store traffic and doesn't involve giving strangers on the internet your home address, and there might be opportunities there to enter logistics and lower delivery costs for people.
For the benefit of all the people on this thread not understanding what the proposal is for the acqusition:
"A leveraged buyout (LBO) is the acquisition of a company (typically by a private equity firm) using a significant amount of borrowed money (debt) to meet the purchase price, often 60% to 90% of the total cost. The target company’s assets are used as collateral for the loans, which are repaid using the company's future cash flows."
Everybody understands the proposal. They also understand that an offer of $20 billion loan + $7.5b cash in hand + stock in Gamestop valued by the market at $11b = $37.5b, which is < $55b, a discrepancy Cohen has not been able to account for. Ebay also understands that leveraged buy-outs are a death sentence, and that saddling its operations with $20b of debt in exchange for gaining a dead business like Gamestop would eventually kill it.
Also when you count that 7.5B cash on hand as part of the deal to me that's to some extent double counting to include it and the current market value of all of GME's stock. At least part of the stock's value comes from the existence of the cash so it's not wholly separate from the value of the stock.
The $20B letter from TB is the leveraged part of the buy out and the math still doesn't add up even if you for some reason allow GME to dispose of all their cash in the deal without taking a hit to their stock price.
In a leveraged buyout you actually buy out the company so you take the risk of the debt and the sellers get the cash... Trying to do a 50% cash, 50% share deal, (where the shares hold the debt that generated the cash) is asking eBay's shareholders to be paid with cash borrowed from themselves!
This pattern of acquiring a company via debt financed on the value of the company is a leveraged buyout, is far from new and it's definitely quite corrosive to the finances of the new company. The pattern that plays out time and time again is the new debt from the acquisition severely hampers the new entity's ability to actually make the changes that might save them other than the chance to be raided by the buyer's management firm of choice.
>> whose current existence appears to be due to a weird short squeeze anomaly, is not a sustainable business.
I remember working in a CD Warehouse in the early aughts. Our store was next door to a Game Stop. The woman who worked at the Game Stop would come over and chat music with me when her store was slow. We used to joke about how both of our industries are seemingly dying a slow death. Console and game prices were going through the roof at the time. Compact Discs were being replaced by downloadable music. A few months before I quit, we finally started reselling DVD's to buoy the CD reselling part of the store.
As it turns out, the gaming industry outlasted the CD reselling business by quite a bit. lol
The context this comment misses is Gamestop's secret weapon is their CEO Ryan Cohen who has been sitting around the hoop trying to figure out how to leverage Gamestop's fundraising capabilities to do something big
Couple of highlights on Ryan
- Built and sold Chewy from a startup to the largest ecomm acq of all time
- Became #1 individual shareholder of Apple early on
- Bought a 10% share of Gamespot in 2020 becoming largest personal shareholder
- Took over as CEO after being a proactive board member, works for no salary
You should also mention that Cohen never managed to turn Chewy into a profitable business before selling it off.
Similarly, his strategic initiatives at Gamestop have all been failure (e-commerce push, NFTs, digital games platform, crypto investments, ...). The only thing that has worked is aggressively cutting costs, mainly by shutting down stores, which was a plan that had already been proposed by BCG before Cohen came onboard.
Basically, he has done nothing except for taking credit for a plan that was already in motion and repeatedly diluting shareholders to raise funds that have been sitting in T-Bills ever since. There is no indication whatsoever that this guy is some kind of business genius who would be able to run Ebay better than the current management - quite the opposite actually.
I find it weird that people idolize businesspeople who basically just engage in ponzinomics.
They create businesses that don't make any money, often don't have any plans to ever make money, with the hope that they either get bought out by a BigCo or become public so that it becomes the index funds' problem.
It feels like this has been going on for about as long as Silicon Valley has been a thing, so maybe it actually is sustainable, but it sure feels like we are building our economy on a house of cards.
Yeah I've never thought that that was the win that people seem to think it is. When you're that high up in the company, you have so much stock that you can pretty easily get loans against for however much you need, and write off the interest in the process.
Margin interest is tax-deductible, but only when you're using the loan to buy more securities. So, in context, a CEO who "works for no salary" and just takes out loans secured by their stock holdings to fund their lifestyle does not get to write off that interest.
Not to say the "no salary" thing isn't silly anyway, of course.
They have to trot it out because otherwise there's not much else to pimp about Cohen as CEO and this attempted deal seems much more oriented to juice the total market value of GME to more easily meet the criteria for his recent pay package rather than a great idea for either company on it's own.
>I'm arguing it's not "success". I don't believe that a meme stock is a truly long-term business.
Duh.
Crypto is the peak meme investment. Literally worthless, yet the market size is in trillions now, with even pension funds buying into it.
It doesn't follow any fundamentals, but as the meme markets defacto exist, there needs to be some models of valuing these investments other than fundamentals.
GameStop is a zombie company. As a retailer, they have been floundering for years and still are. But as a corporation, they are sitting on a lot of cash and zero debt, from the early-pandemic period they went through as an overvalued meme stock.
They can't afford $56 billion - the proposed acquisition was going to be halfway paid for in stock and halfway via a loan. (Though, they also can't afford $28B in stock - the entire company is only worth $10B - so the idea was going to be to pay for it by issuing new shares of the merged GameStop-Ebay entity, after the deal was signed.)
If that sounds audacious, it's because it is - as far as I've seen, most analysts were not expecting this deal to be taken seriously, and many are calling it a publicity stunt.
"Audacious" is underselling it. "Give me your assets and I'll pay you with them" is about as serious a plan as "I'll go the ATM and get all the free money they give out to pay for it"
They did manage to ride the meme stock insanity to build up $9bn in cash (their market cap is $10bn so it's not worth much more than their cash in hand, because their business has been declining for years).
They propose to borrow $20bn, twice their market cap, to buy a company worth five times their market cap. And 50% of it would be in Gamestop shares, which would be insane for eBay investors to accept. Yes the combined company would now own eBay, but would have the massive baggage of Gamestop's dwindling business plus $20bn of extra debt - a recipe for collapse.
There's no upside for eBay's shareholders, even if Gamestop was capable of pulling off the transaction, which is extremely unlikely even if eBay was crazy enough to be willing to accept it.
Based on their CEO's angry refusal to explain further in TV interviews, it doesn't seem like they can, which is why eBay said that it wasn't a credible offer. It sounds like this is just a way to get a few more headlines for GameStop to keep their meme stock value a bit longer, along with a claim that they're being treated unfairly (which isn't substantive, but then again neither is the basis for their meme stock value, so that might be irrelevant to the ones this PR is attempting to target).
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.
This doesn't make any sense to me, and seems like the exact opposite of what eBay is, but maybe we use eBay differently? When I use it, I am looking for something specific. The chance a random location nearby has that thing is basically 0. If I want to peruse random thrift items, I would go to a thrift store.
A physical store stocked with what? EBay’s strength in today's world is its enormous base of third party sellers all over the world carrying the most niche odds and ends you can think of. Just to be able to show these seller's merchandise in stores would be a massive logistical nightmare. No physical store and certainly not the ones GameStop sized can carry a fraction of what eBay has to offer. They have to fundamentally reshape the business and throw away what made them successful if they want physical stores to make any sense.
ebay started attempting consignment more than ten years ago, but I think lately they only do it for luxury items. Which makes sense to me as a lot of people would just send in junk. https://pages.ebay.com/ebay-consignment/
I do. Its great. You can walk around, look at things, talk to people, maybe buy something you wouldn't based on cover art or whatever. You get to drive a little, listen to some music.
I could maybe see this argument in 2018 or something
In 2026? Online shopping is full of low quality knockoff crap, with deveptive listings that are trying to trick you. Yes, I absolutely prefer physical stores again. In fact I've pretty much stopped online shopping altogether again
Maybe you're just online shopping on Amazon and Temu like it's 2018. It's 2026, low quality knockoff crap is sold in physical stores just as much as online. You just have to pay attention to what you're buying which is true irl and online.
Okay, but Gamestop has very little of the benefits of physical stores, you're not going to inspect the quality of the games without loading it into your machine, and the major auxiliary purchase available for sale is a bunch of Funko Pops.
Gamestop sells a lot more collectables than just Funko Pops. I'm not a collector myself, but if I were I imagine I would prefer to see the thing in person to make sure of its condition before buying.
Me. I love the experience of getting out of the house. Also, online shopping is an extortionist on certain items. There are so many things that are 1/4 the price in a physical store than they are online due to shipping and logistics.
I like browsing stuff in stores too, but that's not what eBay is for - I'm in Australia, the whole point is I can buy stuff from other states in my country, or from the US or other countries if I need, and in the same way I can sell stuff to people in Europe or the UK or Canada or the US from home.
Seeing stuff in person is cool but for an 'eBay Store' you're only going to have a tiny assortment of items, and likely hardly anything you really want in any one physical location... These kind of things already exist (e.g. pawn shops, or here in Australia we have a chain called Cash Converters but it's mostly disappearing) and eBay's value proposition is different in that it opens that up from just items from people within driving range, to anyone around the world.
So having physical stores doesn't add much value for eBay.
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.
Just saw this for the first time. How someone can show up on a major network like this is beyond my understanding. Literally couldn't answer where the money would come from.
He works his ass off. You obviously can't spot a bear trap :-) The lower range of $GME the past couple of years is nowhere near where the shorts are going to have to buy-in.
If diluting your stock is a magical infinite money glitch, why doesn't Cohen just buy Nvidia? Heck, I think GOOG is now the most valuable, why not both? Throw TSLA in while you are at it and AMZN, I am sure there is some synergistic potential.
It's a literal cult. They have to believe there's some magic future where they magically end up controlling the world still, because otherwise they've been pumped for money they couldn't even afford.
Tbh, if you can convince someone to take your relatively worthless pieces of paper in exchange for your valuable asset, then your worthless pieces of paper are no longer worthless.
Not much different than me having a bit of cash and putting 5% or 20% down to buy a home or car: now I’m a big asset and debt holder and you got some pieces of paper with dead presidents on it.
That was the hard part of the deal: will (enough) eBay shareholders want to be GameStop shareholders.
eBay shareholders would be right to be upset with eBay management. eBay has treaded water in a niche of online shopping while online shopping has grown massively. Whether GameStop is their solution or not, Iunno.
> That was the hard part of the deal: will (enough) eBay shareholders want to be GameStop shareholders.
There is no upside for eBay shareholders - a leveraged buyout makes sense if it's for 100% cash, because the buyers are taking the risk and the debt, and the sellers get the cash. But in this deal, Gamestop need to borrow the money to pay 50% to eBay's shareholders, but then the other 50% eBay's shareholders get is shares in the company that holds all that debt!?!
It would be better for eBay's investors if eBay themselves just borrowed $20bn to do share buybacks. I mean, it would still be dumb and make absolutely no financial sense (because they still hold shares in the company that holds the debt) but at least they wouldn't have the extra liability of Gamestop's dwindling business on the side.
Patrick Boyle on Finance has a Youtube video on the topic (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iBlu45HFruk). He basically explained that they simply can't afford the proposed transaction, so it was never going to actually happen.
It was a clown-show interview, but also likely on purpose from the CEO. The CEO does not like CNBC (their history of reporting on GME as a meme stock), and his schtick plays to retail investors. The problem is to get a deal like this done he needs to convince non-retail investors to come along. He also clearly didn't want to say 'dilution' when pressed about where the rest of the stock would come from.
CNBC hard fumbled in that they didn't even understand what the offer was. The CEO put that on full display and embarrassed the hosts basic knowledge of finance. It was hard to watch.
The math doesn't actually math. Even if you're not discounting the cash on hand from GME's value all of GME's market value, plus their cash on hand, plus the "highly confident" $20B still doesn't add up to the take over value in Cohen's letter.
What a bizarre interview that was. The least damaging interpretation is he was intentionally being bad to spite CNBC in a basically (though their explanation doesn't include this) childish fit for earlier bad coverage of GME.
I have absolutely no clue how you could watch the interview and come away with this conclusion. The purpose of an interview is to ask Socratic questions to allow the guest to talk about something of which they have intimate knowledge.
The CEO made it seem like he himself didn't know how the math for the offer worked, and even when presented multiple opportunities to correct that impression, he made no attempt to convince anyone otherwise.
I imagine the actual reason why Cohen didn’t answer the question is that he would have to admit that if the combined entity issued enough shares to pay for the acquisition, it would substantially dilute existing shareholders.
I agree, but he had to know he'd be asked the question, right? And he had to know that staring blankly and mumbling about the offer being on the website wouldn't suffice as an explanation. It's just mind-boggling behavior from the CEO of a public company.
Yes you do. He came away with that conclusion because he entered with that conclusion. When you're already radicalized to a specific outcome, you lose the ability to perform the process of elimination.
> I have absolutely no clue how you could watch the interview and come away with this conclusion.
The reason is pretty apparent. They are bagholders. People like this show up in every thread about Gamestop boasting about how amazing Cohen is in a weirdly personal manner, and have a very fantastical view of how things are going to go -- because their investment depends on it, and they built a literal cult around the idea that GME would make them rich, which necessitates viewing reality a little differently from the rest of us.
For more information, see Dan Olsen's "This is Financial Advice." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5pYeoZaoWrA Its a few years old, but gives you some perspective on the weird cult that has been built around GME.
"We are asking our stockholders to approve an amendment to our Third Amended and Restated Certificate of Incorporation, as amended by the Certificate of Amendment dated June 2, 2022 (the “Existing Charter”), to increase the number of authorized shares of our common stock to 2,500,000,000, and correspondingly increase the number of authorized shares of all classes of our stock to 2,505,000,000 for the reasons discussed below. Our Existing Charter currently authorizes the issuance of 1,000,000,000 shares of common stock and 5,000,000 shares of preferred stock."
Cocaine (or whatever their CEO is on) doesn't buy itself.
Edit: Also, the fact that company leadership can get away with this kind of thing, fleecing retail investors for millions/billions of dollars, and face no consequences is...I dunno. I guess it's just normal now. Lawlessness, bribery, favors to the right politicians, lying without hesitation or remorse. People in media clutching their pearls over whatever the Gen Z kids are getting up to on TikTok while this shit is going on is just the icing on the cake.
I thought their stockholders were super into direct registration to trigger the "mother of all short squeezes" when (or so the conspiracy went anyway) all the evil hedge funds would have to buy back their alleged naked shorts for infinite money. That doesn't really play well with Gamestop putting 1.5 billion extra shares on the market, which is basically exactly the reverse of a short squeeze and would surely push down prices.
Or was this a 2022 thing and Gamestop investors have moved on from diamond handing?
They're in an entirely alternate reality where those evil hedge funds did not fleece them for all they're worth. They got had, by GME insiders and by institutional investors. And, lots of people warned them, but they had belief and diamond hands.
I hate that this shit goes unpunished. Though, I guess the apes got mad as hell at anyone that tried to talk them down, or did anything to slow the bleeding.
The apes did get punished though? And the hedge funds correctly took advantage of irrational behavior by other actors in the market. This is how price-finding in the markets is supposed to work, I can barely call that "evil".
No, I mean the GME insiders who made a bunch of money off the apes, pretending to be on their side. They may be gullible and ignorant about the market (and very annoying online), but it's shady as hell that GME leadership hasn't been forthright about the state of things.
I mean they make a good point -- ebay isn't a serious company anymore. It really needs someone with a vision to rebuild it. That its limping along and executives are essentially bleeding a previously valuable internet asset dry is kind of sad.
They can't rebuild it. Facebook Marketplace is allowing people to buy and sell locally for free with systems for managing fraud that are more robust than Craigslist. How do you rebuild when a way larger company - with a side project of theirs - offers one of your core businesses for free?
eBay has always competed with print and online classifieds. And started the successful Kijiji (in Canada). If what you’re selling is niche enough, local doesn’t work, and has a lot of friction unless it’s something too big to ship.
I like to pay the cheapest price humanly possible but there’s often value in just paying the shipping and online premium. As a seller, it’s easier to put up a posting whenever I feel and stuff it in a box and label it only when I have cash in hand.
+ there’s some geo-arbitrage for sellers: chances are the person willing to pay the most isn’t local to you.
EBay is still more friction than Amazon and eBay commissions are like 16% these days so eBay’s completely lost the giant pie that is mass-manufactured goods.
They're doing a terrible job of preventing scams. Right now there are hundreds of listings for GPUs at too-good-to-be-true prices from sellers with 0 feedback or, worse, from old accounts with positive feedback that have obviously been taken over by scammers (all the feedback is from years ago and about unrelated products). Trust is what eBay brings to the table, when they cede that to scammers, they stop being useful...I can get scammed on TikTok any time I want.
Is this really a big problem for buyers now? Asking genuinely, not rhetorically. In my experience with eBay (my account is 25 years old), the one thing you could count on is that buyers who receive nothing, or get a box of bricks, or broken items or whatever, basically 100% of the time, will get refunded - if necessary, by eBay itself. (This has been frustrating of course for honest sellers who get scammed by buyers.)
So, if they have a ton of scammers now, I would think customers are not being that impacted, and I would have also thought that eBay wouldn’t have too hard a time getting the sellers to pay the refunds, since they tend to withhold the funds from sellers until a little while after the delivery is confirmed.
It makes it feel sketchy. I don't know what the state of buyer protection is. I've read that sellers sometimes list in other countries to get around the PayPal buyer protections or otherwise get paid via some unprotected method.
I can't believe all those hundreds of thousands of listings would continue to exist if there weren't some kind of pay off. Somebody's got to be making money somehow, as it's been happening for ages.
Also, it makes searching difficult. Can't really sort by price anymore, because the lowest prices are almost entirely scams.
It's just a much less pleasant platform when half the listing are fake. This is most extreme on GPUs and RAM, of course, since that's where the feeding frenzy is happening, but it's true of many categories with expensive goods.
> I've read that sellers sometimes list in other countries to get around the PayPal buyer protections
The buyer protections don’t really vary much, but it’s true in some countries they get more protections but it’s more regarding to buyer’s remorse rather than Items Not As Described.
> or otherwise get paid via some unprotected method
At least in North America (and maybe everywhere else), you’ve been required to pay via eBay for all transactions for the last decade or more. No more money orders, bank transfers, cheques or wire transfers or cash. And you can’t easily contact sellers/buyers directly anymore, it’s all through the platform and they block a lot of suspect messages/keywords.
I don't know, man, I just know there's a lot of fake listings on eBay. I don't know what they're getting out of it, but I assume they're not just doing it for fun.
(I couldn't believe myself at first seeing things like these happening and this clip in particular, how does one get millions of dollars for such an disastrously wild interview to me feels quite off to me)
The fact that a guy like this can rise to the level of CEO making millions pretty much sums up everything wrong with the world. I don't think I would trust that guy to make a sandwich.
I would admit that when I had first heard the news (from hackernews) and read its comments, people gave multiple examples and convuluted examples on how this all makes sense and the financial aspects. I was left feeling impressed that perhaps gamestop might've been thinking something new.
Then I watched the video.
> I would trust that guy to make a sandwich.
Don't worry, we are just trusting him with around a measly 11 billion dollars.
This isn't even the worst part by the way, somehow the worst part to me feels like there are people who watched that interview and then somehow got even more convinced within this person/gamestop and publicly glaze him.
To them, I have a question like, are we watching the same interview? How can anyone watch that interview and then consider it in any way positively or anything like that, like huh, have we watched the same interview?
Perhaps some of us at first (like within that HN discussion) were/are trying to justify as if it is some massive brain effort by gamestop or anything and its a 5d chess move ,but to me, this interview showed me what the reality is actually.
>To them, I have a question like, are we watching the same interview? How can anyone watch that interview and then consider it in any way positively or anything like that, like huh, have we watched the same interview?
It all comes down to a belief in "trolling". Once you assume that your chosen individual might act stupid on purpose, you lose the ability to discern between actual stupidity and fake stupidity. GameStop enthusiasts see that interview and assume Cohen is mocking the interviewers as a show of intentional disrespect. They think he's not actually clueless, just trolling.
Unfortunately, this sort of belief is self-reinforcing. Once you get over the hurdle of believing in trolling the first time, the next instance seems completely plausible. Every time it happens, you become more convinced that the person engages in a pattern of trolling — after all, you've seen it so many times! You don't realize that the source of your belief is not accumulated independent evidence, but a chain that rests on a single link.
This is because the community around Gamestop is radicalized by the exact same grievance culture behind the MAGA movement. It even started conveniently in January of 2021, at a point of MAGA's seeming obsolescence. The adherents of this movement have already accepted the final result as guaranteed, and literally every piece of news the world over gets interpreted through the lens of this eventuality that Gamestock's stock price will explode, making them all millionaires and billionaires. Just like MAGA, the community is full of people whose main role is to delegitimize negative news, and reframe it all as instead proof that the mother of all short squeezes is imminent. Today is the perfect day to see this playing out on their subreddits.
The Performance Hurdles will be adjusted by the Committee equitably and proportionately as determined by the Committee in a manner designed to preserve the economic opportunity provided under the Award, (a) higher to account for acquisition activity for which stock is provided as consideration; and (b) lower to account for a split-up, spin-off, dividend or other distribution (whether in the form of cash, shares, other securities, or other property) or divestiture activity, in each case, that could be considered material to the achievement of the Performance Hurdles, as applicable.
Matt Levine's recent opinion piece for Bloomberg ("GameStop Doesn’t Have Enough Stock", https://archive.ph/3h8wf) goes into a bit more detail about it, including why such an acquisition might still help him get there even if it doesn't instantly get him halfway.
There's nothing in Ryan Cohen's career that instills confidence to me. He seems like another tech leader that just got lucky at selling their company (which was only unprofitable for the majority of its lifetime until very very recently) during an economic era that is unlikely to return in any of our lifetimes (or our children's lifetimes).
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.
alternate link: https://archive.ph/rsC6e
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.
I buy and sell through eBay about once a month and I agree. eBay isn't perfect but over several hundred transactions and a few disputes that were settled fairly I've had a good experience. I know it's possible to have a bad experience and I'm not discounting those stories, but it's not the standard eBay experience.
GameStop was trying to do a Private Equity style takeover. Everyone hates it when PE companies do that, but GameStop is an lol memestock so that fact was overlooked with all of the to the moon comments. I do not want any platform I use being taken over by in a highly leveraged takeover, especially not by GameStop.
I've had two disputes that materially ignored the facts of the dispute, in one case where even the buyer said he didn't and wouldn't do as agreed, and still won, costing me $700+.
You can't say "I've had a few disputes that were handled fairly, so when other people say there's weren't, that's not the standard eBay experience".
> You can't say "I've had a few disputes that were handled fairly, so when other people say there's weren't, that's not the standard eBay experience"
I did not say that. I specifically said I know some people have bad experiences, but that I don't. Please don't fake-quote things that someone didn't say.
I acknowledge that some people have bad experiences and some people (like you) can be extra unlucky, but I wouldn't say that your bad experiences are the standard eBay experience. Logically, if everyone was losing money like that all over the platform nobody would be selling there any more.
If getting scammed is the standard eBay seller experience, surely you'd have heard about it before deciding to sell? I've been selling on ebay for years and I've never had a dispute. Having very few, high value sales is sort of a red flag for scams. If you don't have a lot of prior positive feedback maybe that's why you lost your disputes?
I've sold on eBay for over 20 years and millions of dollars. I would like to know more about your experience as a seller where you had disputes handled poorly, especially one that cost you $700?
I'm not the commenter, but about 20 years ago when ebay owned paypal still, I sold 26 iPod nanos in a big sale on ebay. Everyone received theirs except one guy, and the tracking showed the shipper lost it, in that the package just stopped being scanned in the USPS system halfway through. He complained, completely understandable! eBay froze my account, froze the payments for all 26, and I never saw the money ever again.
They wouldn't let me just refund the one customer. I had to prove the other 25 were delivered, so I did that. Then I had to prove they actually got iPods, so I linked them to the reviewed transactions that showed people were happy with the iPods. So then I had to prove my identity to eBay. They wanted my license, so I did that. Then a utility so I sent my light bill. Then my phone bill. Then my natural gas bill. Then my lease. Then they asked for my passport, which I did not have at that time. Suddenly nothing could be done without the passport, and they'd keep the money for 180 days and then mail me a check. Except then they said they were keeping the money anyway because I didn't provide a passport. Five grand, gone.
From that day on I'd have multiple eBay accounts at all times, spread things out around them so that when (not if, when) they would freeze an account for a review, I'd just cancel everything, refund whatever purchase was in review, and never use that account again. I learned that the review process is just a delay process to make you think there was progress when you'd already been banned but since you thought there was a chance, you'd keep busy in the no-go queue for however long you interacted with the bot before you gave up rather than calling support.
Ok. I've been through that, though it is a function of Paypal. You can absolutely recover the funds from a limited account. 20 years later, I would still pursue this. In fact, if you aren't able to log in I would check with the unclaimed property division of the state your account was registered in when you had the account. PayPal and eBay are publicly traded fully audited companies, there is no, we just get to keep the money scenario.
I sold a Mavic 2 Pro drone with 5 batteries. The whole process was a mess. Scammer initially complained that it didn't come with a CrystalSky tablet that was in one picture (that was only added AFTER after he had bid already and asked to see Flight Logs, and was explicitly disclaimed as not being a part of the package, nor was it in the receipts I sent the buyer). After pointing out those details, silence.
Then, three weeks later:
"The batteries don't work. I want a refund."
"Batteries? Any of them? All of them?"
"All of them, none work. I want a refund."
Note that two of the batteries were less than 4 months old, still in warranty.
He then stated he wanted a refund of $800. For five brand-new batteries, that would only be $670.
No evidence was shown, despite multiple requests (like a video of a battery on a charger, or on the drone, failing to power up). I stated I'd like to get the original batteries back, as at least I'd be able to get them replaced under warranty or possibly repaired and recoup some of my money (I was skeptical there was -any- issue, but still, good faith). He "happily" agreed. I asked him to send me a message on eBay (so it was tracked and not avoiding their system) acknowledging that offering a partial refund was contingent on his sending me the batteries back and that he accepts me disputing the refund if not.
He sends a message indicating all of the above.
Refund is sent (for about $700, to include his return shipping costs).
Thirty-five minutes later, I get a message, "USPS says they don't ship damaged batteries, so I will not be returning them". (35 minutes? So what, you were just sitting around waiting for the refund, and then the very moment I sent the money, you jumped in your car, got to the post office, had this discussion, got home, and were able to send me this message? When your home address shows you about 15 minutes from the nearest post office?)
I then suggest we meet in person to exchange them (I live a few hours away, not convenient, but still, $700...). He umms and ahhs, "How will I be able to prove that I gave them to you in person?". I suggest we do it in a police station and point out that his local PD even welcomes people to use their lobby for CL, etc. on their website. More umms and ahhs. "I need to contact eBay support to see if they allow this." I point him to eBay's specific FAQ page describing exactly this and how they recommend doing in person sales, and refunds, documentation thereof, and how they support it. But he ignores that and says, "I never heard back from eBay support, so I'm not sure what to do". I point this page out again, and he goes silent.
I opened a dispute. No evidence was provided for damage or faulty goods, referenced the multiple requests for video, or of anything.) Multiple instances of the buyer trying to show something was problematic with the listing, not abiding by the agreement and refusing/avoiding any method of returning damaged items.
Overnight, no further inquiries.
"We have closed your dispute. Based on our review, the buyer is entitled to keep the partial refund for damage. He is also not required to return the damaged items".
So he ended up with a Mavic 2 Pro, with less than 20 hours flight time, 5 batteries, for in the order of $950, all told.
Sorry that happened, scammers are the worst. Yeah unfortunately here the refund being sent proactively was the issue and eBay isn't really able to recoup those funds. Ex: the buyer used a credit card, you refund and it goes back to his card on the original authorization. Your dispute can't go anywhere because eBay isn't able to just reauthorize the buyers card without their consent.
You're grossly straw-manning a complex situation by reducing this deal to a 'Private Equity style takeover' that 'everyone hates'...
If anyone is interested in learning more here's a great primary source interview with an ebay seller: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C1ij2nQymtA
and a retrospective here for those without as time/interest
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OyS9Q-LnhPE
I think it's good to let folks reach their own conclusions!
Your post has strong feelings and is light on facts...
> If anyone is interested in learning more here's a great primary source interview with an ebay seller: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C1ij2nQymtA
This is an interview with the GameStop CEO
Of course he thinks the takeover is a good idea.
I guess the GameStop true believers are out coming out to astroturf this thread?
Yeah that's what a primary source is: words from a principal architect of the deal, not a vague description using emotionally-charged terms. The interviewer is a professional eBay seller, so I think lots of what's mentioned in the interview is relevant to much of the discussion in this thread.
If you were interested in learning more about the nuance of the situation you might appreciate the information therein, but you're also free to reply to anyone who provides alternate perspectives or additional information with silly labels like 'true believer' instead of addressing the content of their messages!
Why not get qualified information from a neutral party that can evaluate the merger proposal based on available data?
Patrick Boyle made an excellent video on this. Highly entertaining to watch as well:
https://youtu.be/iBlu45HFruk?si=LdoaCZagpaP0Z4tu
I agree. eBay has a strong brand, one of the oldest web brands. It should just continue doing what it's doing.
If they would just put the search back to how it was (deterministic) so it would do exactly what you ask for, not one of these modern searches where it kinda bubbles up a few items, but the rest is all random sorta-maybe like what you asked.
They probably should do more marketing.
My engagement with adblocking technology is such that I actually have little insights into how much marketing ebay does.
Don't they do TV commercials, engage with creators on ebay live, and have normal Adsense type ads?
They market pretty heavily in growth markets. They're really heavy in advertising in the UK and Europe. There's a lot of digital remarketing they do in the US.
This is a good joke because they spent $2.4B on marketing in FY25
eBay stock is at all time highs, but sure, I'll bet you could do better.
Why? Who isn't aware of eBay?
It's about the brand. Ehen shopping online, everyone may have heard of eBay, but how many people are going to go there first, as opposed to Amazon, Etsy, AliExpress, Temu, wherever else. And yes, eBay is going to have the weird eBay stuff, but if users don't even think to go looking there, they've lost a sale.
Legitimately millions of people. It also depends on the item but Amazon has been worse than eBay in my experience since at least the pandemic. AliExpress and Temu have some overlap to eBay but also offer a different consistency of experience.
They aren’t competing with Amazon anymore though
As one data point, if I want something new, I go Amazon first and eBay second. If I want something used, I go to eBay first. My search usually ends there, but if I can't find it there, I probably have to go to a specialty forum.
Even for bootleg stuff (mostly long out of print arcade hardware), eBay is pretty much on par with AliExpress.
As a seller I'm also relieved. Ebay has gotten bad but I can't even imagine how Gamestop would squeeze sellers.
Exactly, especially if they have to immediately start repaying $10's of billions in debt that GameStop wanted to put them in. Whole thing is just dumb of the CEO.
Hard agree. I am an eBay seller and this had me thinking actively about what I'd have to do if they went under or stopped offering a quality service.
Are you trading collectibles? I’m just genuinely curious what someone would buy with 2-3 transactions a month.
Not parent, if you want to sell an old original video game you know has value, it's either the proper collector channel (slow, super involved, higher pay), the generic resale channels (fast, no effort, lowest amount possible) or ebay (relatively fast, a bit involved but not too much, pay depends on how good you defined the product).
I had some old stuff around that Mr everyday might find (eg pristine original Gameboy Pokémon cartridge without box), and quick resale would give me 10 euro, involved resale would ask me hours and hours of work ebay allowed me to sale for 120+euro spending 1h on the description and picture (to show the scratch etc).
Another case is "oh you have the msi ge77vx4 laotop and you look for the plastic keyboard map in azerty? You can pay a 500e rma if they even allow it or buy the piece for 20e on ebay and fix it yourself"
Ymmv but it has a specific place that no one really have right now
(a) used books. As a Midwesterner I love that can directly order specific technology books (the ones everyone recommends), literally from a Goodwill in San Francisco, for the price of a good meal
(b) dodging Amazon co-mingling of inventory. Do I trust Amazon doing whatever it wants in a warehouse, or some eBay seller with a few years of built-up-reputation to lose but who specializes in the part I want? Let me tell you I have gotten a lot more handwritten thank-you-for-your-purchase notes from eBay sellers than Amazon. 3D printer parts, used computers+parts for the homelab, laser printer replacement parts, etc.
(Yes Amazon said they would stop recently... Not sure I believe it's fixed yet)
I use it for non collectible stuff. I’m always buying weird interesting things. Old computer stuff at least once a month.
I buy most of my physical games from eBay too
> Old computer stuff at least once a month.
So, collectables...
How did you determine that? As someone who also buys old computer stuff from time to time, I wouldn't say they are collectibles.
There's collectables as in over priced stuff and collectables as in what ever you like to collect.
I think the former is more useful, and the latter could be anything.
The GGP was probably thinking the former, the GP being pedantic used the latter.
> the GP being pedantic used the latter.
I was aiming for sassy.
If people are collecting them, they're collectable.
Sorry, a bit cheeky but if you are regularly buying old computer hardware then you are collecting.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with it. I still have my ZX Spectrum 48k, Atari ST and the Archimedes my parent acquired when the school was dumping them for PCs.
It's a collection.
I was selling NES/SNES games + boxes. After ~2 years of sporadic sales, I ended up just offloading them to a guy who has a huge used games outpost at a flea market.
I buy a mix of things: clothes, watches, and usually tiles from my favorite pottery in Michigan: Pewabic.
Literally anything that isn't actively manufactured anymore. Even a lot of specialty stores will just sell through their ebay account.
It's great for used car parts (both buying and selling, as a hobbyist)
I backed into my garage stupidly and broke my RAV4's side mirror. I found a guy in Japan who was selling the exact part I needed (the cover for the mirror matching my paint color), OEM for $50. It's like Craigslist but global on eBay. Never change.
I frequently buy project car stuff on Ebay. You can find OE stuff with the part numbers scratched off that must have "fallen off the assembly line" pretty easily. Easily a few items per month between that and computer parts!
> OE stuff with the part numbers scratched off
I’ve gotten those off rockauto.
Impossible to say if they’re seconds or the OE just has 1 mould and finds it easier to sand off the excess logo weight.
I use them to buy refurbished enterprise machines -- laptops & mini PCs, books and DVDs/BluRays. Works pretty well actually, never had any issues with the quality as long as you stick to reputed sellers.
Probably Pokemon or sports cards.
There's a lot of low volume and niche stuff sold by industrial ecommerce (grainger, Mcmaster, etc) and sites specializing in a given niche that those sellers cross list to eBay (the higher volume stuff is typically sold on Amazon)
I'm the same way as OP. I'll go clean out my basement, find a load of old tech and just put it up in a bundle or sell it individually for dirt cheap. Likewise, I buy a lot of stuff like minimal wallets, micro-electronics like charging cables, dongles for my work laptop, phone cases. Just typically a lot of knick knacks or older tech stuff. There's a booming economy for old walkmans and cd players. Same thing with higher end audio stuff like older DAC's, speakers, amps. A lot of unique stuff you can't find on Amazon or elsewhere.
I got scammed on a $25 item in 2003 and never went back.
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.
The TD Bank securities commitment of 20B to finance the deal and GameStop having a market cap far below the acquisition cost suggests that buying eBay would’ve been very problematic and risky for investors. But comparing it to K mart buying sears isn’t really accurate to me.
Like yeah, GameStop clearly fits into the death of retail, and acquiring eBay does increase their market visibility or presence. Beyond that, what ebay/GS could’ve gained is way different and arguably more substantial than what acquiring Sears did for either company involved. Atleast here, one operates storefronts for second hand transactions and the other expressly doesn’t. There is definitely money in that.
If eBay thought having storefronts would be advantageous, they would have them. It doesn't make a lot of sense for eBay to merge with Gamestop only for the combined entity to decide that the most sensible first thing to do is close all the Gamestop locations.
The physical Gamestop locations are also horrifically overprovisioned to be an eBay storefront. Many companies have already experimented with things like "lockers" which seem to be successful enough to hang around, probably because the costs are low enough they don't need to do much to justify themselves and they don't need dedicated store fronts. If they want better assurance that the things being shipped are what the sellers claim they are a partnership with UPS or Fedex and their wide variety of existing storefronts that are already provisioned with everything you need to ship almost anything makes orders of magnitude more sense, and nobody has to "acquire" the other to make that work, without the square footage of a Gamestop location.
GameStop's idea behind using their physical locations isn't for ease of shipping so much as ease of verification. People buying brand-name stuff off eBay (and Vinted, etc) pay for verification services to make sure that it's real. The idea - which is the only good/sane part of this entire takeover proposal - is to have retail locations that do the verification in person instead of shipping items to a central location for verification on sale.
But if eBay thought that would bring in more sales, I doubt it would be hard to find empty retail outlets in every city/town in the US and Europe since high street retail has been on a death spiral for years.
You can already use lockers for delivery/drop off with eBay through their courier company partners, at least in the UK.
Wouldn't verification for almost anything beyond the extremely basic need specialized people? I don't think it's reasonable to train every Gamestop employee to be able to verify everything from fancy Swiss watches to brand name clothing to playing cards. At least if you do it in a central location you can have actual experts do the verification.
Yup, you save a few dollars per verification on shipping in exchange for spending tens of thousands on training each employee to verify items. Mind you these are retail employees so turnover is going to be high. Also since they need to be able to verify everything they won't have time to be in store since they'll constantly need to be studying new products. That or you just have them work off checklists for each product in which case the value of the verification isn't great since counterfeiters will just buy those check lists and manufacture to them.
The end result is much much higher cost per verification, and a less trusted quality of verification. But you save a few bucks on shipping.
The verification I'd be looking for immediately in-store would be "is this [product] or is this a brick?" - that once happened to me, with (for all I see sellers complain about excessively buyer-friendly policies) no recourse or compensation. If there's a more-complicated verification needed, the buyer could request that it be held onto until that's performed (elsewhere, if necessary). Verifiable chain of custody protects both buyers and sellers.
Not that a dodgy Gamestop merger is necessary for this, but I'd be (much) more likely to both buy and sell on eBay if it existed.
I'm not sure I follow/buy the premise of moving second-hand sales to a physical building as beneficial to eBay.
If I'm looking for X, I'd much rather go to an online store, where I have access to several listings of X at varying prices and condition, vs. make a trip to a physical store, see if they have X, and hope that the condition and price matches my expectations.
Maybe if I'm not looking for X, and just want to browse a bunch of stuff (e.g. yardsale/flea market style), then a physical store could make sense.
But, to me, having this middle-man physical presence was already a problem, and eBay solved this.
I just don't feel like eBay needs GameStop.
Now, whether GameStop needs eBay is a different story. But GameStop is in trouble for two reasons:
1. Video games -- and therefore video game sales -- are moving to digital.
2. Physical stores are becoming a thing of the past for retail transactions.
eBay doesn't need GameStop's troubles.
I could see it potentially be something like the Walmart pickup service? Last mile delivery is pretty expensive, so conceivably they could offer faster and/or cheaper shipping if you picked it up at a physical store.
I don't know. I don't think this acquisition would be a good idea.
^This. The crazy part is that in today’s PE-style system of things, the incentives…
- GameStop shareholders
- GameStop the company - e.g. employees
- eBay shareholders
- eBay the company - for example its employees
…aren’t necessarily aligned.
If GAME buys EBAY - it’s an exit for the EBAY shareholders, which is easy for them to evaluate as it’s presumably a $ premium over the share price today. If GAME then runs the company into the ground trying to free up the cash to pay off the acquisition debt, as most leveraged buyouts do (especially where retail is involved), that’s not a problem for those already-exited shareholders, though it is probably a problem for employees of either company.
My understanding is that existing Ebay shareholders would get half cash and half stock. In order to actually profit, those shareholders would need to believe that the combined company's stock could be sold off without taking a significant loss.
Yeah. On the individual level you can plan to sell immediately, but it sure wouldn't be pretty if a lot of the shareholders decided to do the same!
If this deal does eventually go through, then it might be a good time for someone to start working on a competitor to take over the online auction space.
The biggest headache has always been fraud, eBay gets if from both sides and it's a pretty intractable problem to solve as the middle man.
That's what those huge ~10% final value fees they charge are for. And other revenue such as sponsored listings (pay to boost your item in search results).
As long as they keep the fraud volume below like 5% of sales, I feel like it's just a numbers game, where they just need to get as much sales onto their platform as possible to give them enough operating margin to cover their costs (including fraud) and provide profit.
Admittely, I have no idea how well they're doing at that, I haven't looked at their financial statements or anything.
Yeah my main point was it's a complete pain in the ass to deal with if you want to do it properly in a way that actually prevents fraud on either side. eBay has kind of just erred one side or the other for most of it's existence and right now the complaints are mostly from the seller side that I see.
I guess that’s why the Amazon model works: if you warehouse and deliver, then you cut out a lot of the fraud.
Sellers gotta deliver one way or another anyway so building out that logistics doesn’t add much friction to the whole process at scale. If things turnover quickly enough, the first mile benefits exceed the warehousing expense.
Amazon's return policy is also getting pretty bad. There's a lot more third party sellers on the platform and occasionally users sent incorrect items get their refund refused because "item not returned" which is extremely frustrating when it happens. They're also kicking more people off for returning large numbers of items.
And as to GME trying to shift to that they did attempt that already, it was one of RC's first attempts at pivoting back in 2022, they added something like a million square feet of warehouse and fulfillment and it didn't really work.
TD didn't commit to $20B their letter only says they're "highly confident" they could raise that much. Very important distinction between the two.
The letter also said it was conditional on the combined entity maintaining investment-grade credit rating, which seems unlikely if the combined entity was saddled with $20B in debt.
K mart is at the very minimum a viable business. GameStop is a meme stock attached to the brand of a moribund business model. I just don't see a world where GameStop's core business ever gains relevance again when gamers have shown a strong revealed preference for digital games over physical ones.
This proposal never made any sense and it speaks volumes about the lunacy of the market that anyone takes it seriously at all.
Gamestop turning into an eBay storefront makes a lot of sense to me and this seemed to be a very rational step to take when the short squeeze anomaly left them with billions in the bank and a business model that no longer makes very much sense with physical game sales being eaten by digital-only sales along with the potential decline of the console.
They already have the position of used buying and sales, extending that into in store receiving and listing of items on eBay makes sense. eBay being in decline as well.
>K-Mart buying Sears ruined that company
Both were quite dead by the time that happened.
I've yet to see a convincing vision of what an eBay physical store looks like that doesn't kind of boil down to a UPS store. The vast majority of their business comes from 3rd party listings and the only real stock they have and sell are in the eBay refurbished line. I'm really not convinced of what a successful eBay store would even be there for.
I've seen some say for authentication but staffing employees able to perform that authentication at even a fraction of existing GameStop stores would be extremely expensive (unless it's terrible authentication) so it again devolves to basically being a UPS store but for eBay shipping items out to be authenticated. Similar to what GameStop does with Pokemon cards and PSA grading except you can't really slab a Rolex or handbag so the authentication is only good so long as the good remains in the hands of the authenticator.
The only small service I think they could offer is a way for sellers to certify what's being shipped to avoid contests, but having that in every GameStop store is also very expensive for a cost they currently just shift onto sellers by siding with the customer. eBay could easily implement that if they wanted by partnering with UPS stores or a program where sellers video the packing or something.
>I've yet to see a convincing vision of what an eBay physical store looks like that doesn't kind of boil down to a UPS store.
Pawn shop for nerds/the middle class.
They could build AI to help authentication and just identifying sellers would help tremendously with fraud.
> Pawn shop for nerds/the middle class.
That's kind of but not really what GameStop was before digital games took over and isn't what eBay is. A majority of Pawn Shop business is in the name pawns and neither eBay nor GameStop have ever done.
> They could build AI to help authentication and just identifying sellers would help tremendously with fraud.
That's a huge step beyond reasonable, there have been billions spent on the current AIs and none of them are up to the task of telling a good fake from a real item. Maybe one day but that's ages away.
And fraud doesn't just happen on the seller side, a big headache for sellers is buyer fraud where they'll claim the item is wrong/broken and there's almost no recourse for sellers to prove that's incorrect. eBay could just as easily partner with UPS stores to implement seller and buyer authentication anyways there's not a huge benefit to GameStop in particular being the partner there. It's always been an option and they haven't taken it.
> They already have the position of used buying and sales, extending that into in store receiving and listing of items on eBay makes sense.
Why do they need to buy eBay to do that?
I think you’re right about Kmart/Sears, though the interesting thing was that Lampert was correct that Sears had a great deal of real estate which had tremendous value. If someone skilled at retail had bought it, they could have used the money from selling some of that, to fix the business. Of course, Lampert was only skilled at finance and RE and very obviously just planned to gently wind down the business while selling off its assets, which is much less risky to do than fixing it - and may have yielded better financial results anyway.
That’s why the popular perception is that the Kmart transaction and Lampert killed it, even though their lot had really been cast 15+ years before, when they stopped innovating, and really stopped investing in their stores completely, without getting serious about e-commerce either. That poisoned their brand, which made it really hard to imagine turning it around.
And really you could say that Discover killed it, because they lost focus on the core (or legacy?) business.
Still, department stores in the US are nothing like they were in their heyday.
Sears and Kmart both did so much diversification in the ~1980s! Discover, Allstate insurance, Dean Witter, Coldwell Banker for Sears (and Kmart had bought Borders, Builders Square, PACE, OfficeMax). If you trace the total return to a holder of Sears stock c. 1980, including the value they would have received in terms of stock in the spinoffs, the shareholders themselves may have actually ended up doing quite well in our timeline, even compared to one where Sears had reinvested all their profits into Sears, Roebuck & Co and maintained a more dominant retailing business as a result. It seems like no one really cared if the core business succeeded or failed, though.
I guess it comes to management.
I agree that if GameStop were basically rebranded as eBay brick and mortar stores, that might work. I guess I just feel like if it were GameStop itself that were managing it then it would be unlikely to actually work.
It's not like digital storefronts are new; I think GameStop should have been pivoting the moment that Steam started getting traction.
You guys might not have seen the recent interviews (last week) with gamestop CEO Ryan Cohen. Gamestop has already pivoted, game and console sales are cyclical and hard to base a business upon. They have leaned hard into collectables as a way to expand their business and retail model.
I am unsure how a Gamestop/eBay storefront would do. Physical manifestations of "eBay stores" have existed in the past and none of them did very well long term.
Dunno how gamestop’s logistics works but they could leverage the existing shops as dropoff points for sellers and offer a pickup point option to bypass the postal system. eBay sellers are at a disadvantage vs Amazon warehouse sellers when it comes to shipping costs.
At least my shipping broker in Canada uses small retail stores as dropoff points and then has a network of gig courier delivery companies they send stuff to for last mile delivery. Saves a lot on shipping costs.
I’ve noticed they don’t really integrate with gig couriers for last mile US shipments, just a few consolidators for mid-mile (eg: UPS Mail Innovations that uses USPS for last mile)
Might further delay delivery times but I use eBay to save some dollars in exchange for delayed gratification.
I don’t know about everybody else but I both sell and buy on eBay items that are more niche but not totally bespoke like on Etsy (e.g. photography equipment or specific hats).
Which means an eBay store would never make sense for my type of buyer or seller because I would just go to one of the many other existing entrenched retailers for regular things.
I know eBay pushes hard for regular retail but ultimately I see it as a marketplace for less fungible items and that’s what it excels at. Regular retail for regular items is easier because the user experience is always standard.
GameStop is trying to sit in the middle and trying to move product that is a little more fungible (previously used games and now more trading cards and collectibles) but I just don’t know how big of a market it is when you have to factor brick and mortar upkeep. I don’t want them to take down eBay in an experiment.
> They have leaned hard into collectables as a way to expand their business and retail model
This is a market that is a fraction of the size of the game market, their pivot is into a smaller business?
>I am unsure how a Gamestop/eBay storefront would do. Physical manifestations of "eBay stores" have existed in the past and none of them did very well long term.
A key here I think is the easy gradual transition here because Gamestop already has the used games business they could slowly integrate that into listing used games on eBay that were received at stores and then add related categories step by step with collectables and consumer electronics. There'd also be options of ebay items delivered to store which increases store traffic and doesn't involve giving strangers on the internet your home address, and there might be opportunities there to enter logistics and lower delivery costs for people.
Im pretty sure thats what the CEO pitched.
They’re only 22 years behind
They still don’t have anywhere close to buying eBay.
Please see: Leveraged Buy Out.
For the benefit of all the people on this thread not understanding what the proposal is for the acqusition: "A leveraged buyout (LBO) is the acquisition of a company (typically by a private equity firm) using a significant amount of borrowed money (debt) to meet the purchase price, often 60% to 90% of the total cost. The target company’s assets are used as collateral for the loans, which are repaid using the company's future cash flows."
Everybody understands the proposal. They also understand that an offer of $20 billion loan + $7.5b cash in hand + stock in Gamestop valued by the market at $11b = $37.5b, which is < $55b, a discrepancy Cohen has not been able to account for. Ebay also understands that leveraged buy-outs are a death sentence, and that saddling its operations with $20b of debt in exchange for gaining a dead business like Gamestop would eventually kill it.
Also when you count that 7.5B cash on hand as part of the deal to me that's to some extent double counting to include it and the current market value of all of GME's stock. At least part of the stock's value comes from the existence of the cash so it's not wholly separate from the value of the stock.
The $20B letter from TB is the leveraged part of the buy out and the math still doesn't add up even if you for some reason allow GME to dispose of all their cash in the deal without taking a hit to their stock price.
In a leveraged buyout you actually buy out the company so you take the risk of the debt and the sellers get the cash... Trying to do a 50% cash, 50% share deal, (where the shares hold the debt that generated the cash) is asking eBay's shareholders to be paid with cash borrowed from themselves!
This pattern of acquiring a company via debt financed on the value of the company is a leveraged buyout, is far from new and it's definitely quite corrosive to the finances of the new company. The pattern that plays out time and time again is the new debt from the acquisition severely hampers the new entity's ability to actually make the changes that might save them other than the chance to be raided by the buyer's management firm of choice.
Ha yes of course, but th EU still have to show they can get the loan. They were unable to show that.
TD bank is never going to give $20b for this transaction, they spelled it out quite clearly in their HC letter. It was a publicity stunt by GME.
>> whose current existence appears to be due to a weird short squeeze anomaly, is not a sustainable business.
I remember working in a CD Warehouse in the early aughts. Our store was next door to a Game Stop. The woman who worked at the Game Stop would come over and chat music with me when her store was slow. We used to joke about how both of our industries are seemingly dying a slow death. Console and game prices were going through the roof at the time. Compact Discs were being replaced by downloadable music. A few months before I quit, we finally started reselling DVD's to buoy the CD reselling part of the store.
As it turns out, the gaming industry outlasted the CD reselling business by quite a bit. lol
The context this comment misses is Gamestop's secret weapon is their CEO Ryan Cohen who has been sitting around the hoop trying to figure out how to leverage Gamestop's fundraising capabilities to do something big
Couple of highlights on Ryan
- Built and sold Chewy from a startup to the largest ecomm acq of all time - Became #1 individual shareholder of Apple early on - Bought a 10% share of Gamespot in 2020 becoming largest personal shareholder - Took over as CEO after being a proactive board member, works for no salary
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ryan_Cohen
You should also mention that Cohen never managed to turn Chewy into a profitable business before selling it off.
Similarly, his strategic initiatives at Gamestop have all been failure (e-commerce push, NFTs, digital games platform, crypto investments, ...). The only thing that has worked is aggressively cutting costs, mainly by shutting down stores, which was a plan that had already been proposed by BCG before Cohen came onboard.
Basically, he has done nothing except for taking credit for a plan that was already in motion and repeatedly diluting shareholders to raise funds that have been sitting in T-Bills ever since. There is no indication whatsoever that this guy is some kind of business genius who would be able to run Ebay better than the current management - quite the opposite actually.
I find it weird that people idolize businesspeople who basically just engage in ponzinomics.
They create businesses that don't make any money, often don't have any plans to ever make money, with the hope that they either get bought out by a BigCo or become public so that it becomes the index funds' problem.
It feels like this has been going on for about as long as Silicon Valley has been a thing, so maybe it actually is sustainable, but it sure feels like we are building our economy on a house of cards.
Wasn’t there something where his comp package mandated 50b in market cap?
Ahh. 100b https://investor.gamestop.com/news-releases/news-details/202...
He gets money every $10B of market cap anyways so even if it never grows this acquisition makes RC money.
> works for no salary
Working for no salary is almost never charitable and is almost always just part of a larger tax avoidance scheme.
Yeah I've never thought that that was the win that people seem to think it is. When you're that high up in the company, you have so much stock that you can pretty easily get loans against for however much you need, and write off the interest in the process.
What U.S. tax code provision allows an individual to write off (non-primary-mortgage) loan interest?
Can't you write off capital losses? I've been able to deduct margin interest from my capital gains.
Margin interest is tax-deductible, but only when you're using the loan to buy more securities. So, in context, a CEO who "works for no salary" and just takes out loans secured by their stock holdings to fund their lifestyle does not get to write off that interest.
Not to say the "no salary" thing isn't silly anyway, of course.
They have to trot it out because otherwise there's not much else to pimp about Cohen as CEO and this attempted deal seems much more oriented to juice the total market value of GME to more easily meet the criteria for his recent pay package rather than a great idea for either company on it's own.
Doesn't matter as long as incentives are aligned. As a major stockholder and active advocate, he is already vested in success.
I'm not sure that the incentives actually are aligned. It seems like the incentives are to think short term and do sketchy shit to pump the stock.
>It seems like the incentives are to think short term and do sketchy shit to pump the stock.
Its a meme stock, that's what stockholders actually want.
I'm arguing it's not "success". I don't believe that a meme stock is a truly long-term business.
>I'm arguing it's not "success". I don't believe that a meme stock is a truly long-term business.
Duh. Crypto is the peak meme investment. Literally worthless, yet the market size is in trillions now, with even pension funds buying into it.
It doesn't follow any fundamentals, but as the meme markets defacto exist, there needs to be some models of valuing these investments other than fundamentals.
Sure, and I think that these things will, eventually, crash. I suspect GameStop will before Bitcoin, but I think both will eventually.
The market can stay irrational for a very long time.
I wish we would normalize people just running a business well and taking a damned salary.
You want to normalize low ambitions?
While successfully running a business in a sustainable way may not be the peak of ambition, calling it low ambition is toxic in the other direction.
Doing a good job without it benefiting your personally.
"Running a business well" is now "low ambitions"?
unironically, yes. go get good at tetris if you need a high score for personal validation.
very impressive spokesman for the business and transaction
> it's on our website https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bmj2PaxX24E
GameStop forgot to pivot to AI-first before making the offer.
[polite golf clap]
A marketing stunt just like when (and I'm reluctant to use their name) Perplexity said it would buy Chrome.
Oh wauw, I already forgot that Perplexity exists.
Polarize the people, it doesn't matter if they shout your name.
I thought gamestop was in financial trouble a few years back, how can they afford 56 billion?
GameStop is a zombie company. As a retailer, they have been floundering for years and still are. But as a corporation, they are sitting on a lot of cash and zero debt, from the early-pandemic period they went through as an overvalued meme stock.
They can't afford $56 billion - the proposed acquisition was going to be halfway paid for in stock and halfway via a loan. (Though, they also can't afford $28B in stock - the entire company is only worth $10B - so the idea was going to be to pay for it by issuing new shares of the merged GameStop-Ebay entity, after the deal was signed.)
If that sounds audacious, it's because it is - as far as I've seen, most analysts were not expecting this deal to be taken seriously, and many are calling it a publicity stunt.
"Audacious" is underselling it. "Give me your assets and I'll pay you with them" is about as serious a plan as "I'll go the ATM and get all the free money they give out to pay for it"
Works for Elon Musk
They did manage to ride the meme stock insanity to build up $9bn in cash (their market cap is $10bn so it's not worth much more than their cash in hand, because their business has been declining for years).
They propose to borrow $20bn, twice their market cap, to buy a company worth five times their market cap. And 50% of it would be in Gamestop shares, which would be insane for eBay investors to accept. Yes the combined company would now own eBay, but would have the massive baggage of Gamestop's dwindling business plus $20bn of extra debt - a recipe for collapse.
There's no upside for eBay's shareholders, even if Gamestop was capable of pulling off the transaction, which is extremely unlikely even if eBay was crazy enough to be willing to accept it.
Based on their CEO's angry refusal to explain further in TV interviews, it doesn't seem like they can, which is why eBay said that it wasn't a credible offer. It sounds like this is just a way to get a few more headlines for GameStop to keep their meme stock value a bit longer, along with a claim that they're being treated unfairly (which isn't substantive, but then again neither is the basis for their meme stock value, so that might be irrelevant to the ones this PR is attempting to target).
They cannot
The stock became a meme
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.
This doesn't make any sense to me, and seems like the exact opposite of what eBay is, but maybe we use eBay differently? When I use it, I am looking for something specific. The chance a random location nearby has that thing is basically 0. If I want to peruse random thrift items, I would go to a thrift store.
The person you replied to was talking about selling, not buying.
Wouldn’t buying up pawn shops be a better bet, then?
A physical store stocked with what? EBay’s strength in today's world is its enormous base of third party sellers all over the world carrying the most niche odds and ends you can think of. Just to be able to show these seller's merchandise in stores would be a massive logistical nightmare. No physical store and certainly not the ones GameStop sized can carry a fraction of what eBay has to offer. They have to fundamentally reshape the business and throw away what made them successful if they want physical stores to make any sense.
ebay started attempting consignment more than ten years ago, but I think lately they only do it for luxury items. Which makes sense to me as a lot of people would just send in junk. https://pages.ebay.com/ebay-consignment/
How would that even work? You can only keep so physical items in a store, plus all the costs of a store ...
Who wants to go to a physical store in 2026?
I do. Its great. You can walk around, look at things, talk to people, maybe buy something you wouldn't based on cover art or whatever. You get to drive a little, listen to some music.
Legitimately. Especially if it's a book shop.
Book shops are actually one of the few physical stores I still want to visit
I always prefer that. When I buy something online, it's always because I couldn't find something suitable in a real store.
I could maybe see this argument in 2018 or something
In 2026? Online shopping is full of low quality knockoff crap, with deveptive listings that are trying to trick you. Yes, I absolutely prefer physical stores again. In fact I've pretty much stopped online shopping altogether again
Maybe you're just online shopping on Amazon and Temu like it's 2018. It's 2026, low quality knockoff crap is sold in physical stores just as much as online. You just have to pay attention to what you're buying which is true irl and online.
Okay, but Gamestop has very little of the benefits of physical stores, you're not going to inspect the quality of the games without loading it into your machine, and the major auxiliary purchase available for sale is a bunch of Funko Pops.
Gamestop sells a lot more collectables than just Funko Pops. I'm not a collector myself, but if I were I imagine I would prefer to see the thing in person to make sure of its condition before buying.
Here in 2026, Gamestop has closed more than 4,000 stores and only has about 2,000 stores open.
The people have voted with their feet, despite anecdata
Me. I love the experience of getting out of the house. Also, online shopping is an extortionist on certain items. There are so many things that are 1/4 the price in a physical store than they are online due to shipping and logistics.
I like browsing stuff in stores too, but that's not what eBay is for - I'm in Australia, the whole point is I can buy stuff from other states in my country, or from the US or other countries if I need, and in the same way I can sell stuff to people in Europe or the UK or Canada or the US from home.
Seeing stuff in person is cool but for an 'eBay Store' you're only going to have a tiny assortment of items, and likely hardly anything you really want in any one physical location... These kind of things already exist (e.g. pawn shops, or here in Australia we have a chain called Cash Converters but it's mostly disappearing) and eBay's value proposition is different in that it opens that up from just items from people within driving range, to anyone around the world.
So having physical stores doesn't add much value for eBay.
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.
Just saw this for the first time. How someone can show up on a major network like this is beyond my understanding. Literally couldn't answer where the money would come from.
Dilated pupils. Delayed responses. Inattentive gaze. Speaking nonsense.
Drugs might explain many things.
He works his ass off. You obviously can't spot a bear trap :-) The lower range of $GME the past couple of years is nowhere near where the shorts are going to have to buy-in.
If diluting your stock is a magical infinite money glitch, why doesn't Cohen just buy Nvidia? Heck, I think GOOG is now the most valuable, why not both? Throw TSLA in while you are at it and AMZN, I am sure there is some synergistic potential.
Remember the term vapourware?
Yes, what about it?
...ya'll are still doing this?
It's a literal cult. They have to believe there's some magic future where they magically end up controlling the world still, because otherwise they've been pumped for money they couldn't even afford.
Doing things the hard/proper way takes time and patience.
Tbh, if you can convince someone to take your relatively worthless pieces of paper in exchange for your valuable asset, then your worthless pieces of paper are no longer worthless.
Not much different than me having a bit of cash and putting 5% or 20% down to buy a home or car: now I’m a big asset and debt holder and you got some pieces of paper with dead presidents on it.
That was the hard part of the deal: will (enough) eBay shareholders want to be GameStop shareholders.
eBay shareholders would be right to be upset with eBay management. eBay has treaded water in a niche of online shopping while online shopping has grown massively. Whether GameStop is their solution or not, Iunno.
> That was the hard part of the deal: will (enough) eBay shareholders want to be GameStop shareholders.
There is no upside for eBay shareholders - a leveraged buyout makes sense if it's for 100% cash, because the buyers are taking the risk and the debt, and the sellers get the cash. But in this deal, Gamestop need to borrow the money to pay 50% to eBay's shareholders, but then the other 50% eBay's shareholders get is shares in the company that holds all that debt!?!
It would be better for eBay's investors if eBay themselves just borrowed $20bn to do share buybacks. I mean, it would still be dumb and make absolutely no financial sense (because they still hold shares in the company that holds the debt) but at least they wouldn't have the extra liability of Gamestop's dwindling business on the side.
eBay does pay out a tiny dividend… would be better for everyone’s taxes if they did buybacks with it…
If they leveraged up a bit more for even more buybacks, they wouldn’t be the first to do so.
https://www.google.com/finance/beta/quote/EBAY:NASDAQ?window...
eBay is doing fine.
$49b market cap.
Today Amazon is down 1.8%, or down ~$52b today.
EBay is surviving but blew the online shopping wave, despite having owned (and created?) a big proportion of it.
Patrick Boyle on Finance has a Youtube video on the topic (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iBlu45HFruk). He basically explained that they simply can't afford the proposed transaction, so it was never going to actually happen.
He didn't want to say the "D" word.
(Dilute the religious share holders to have them finance the deal)
Guys, we have a web for a reason. For links!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bmj2PaxX24E
Disagree https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LTJvdGcb7Fs
It was a clown-show interview, but also likely on purpose from the CEO. The CEO does not like CNBC (their history of reporting on GME as a meme stock), and his schtick plays to retail investors. The problem is to get a deal like this done he needs to convince non-retail investors to come along. He also clearly didn't want to say 'dilution' when pressed about where the rest of the stock would come from.
CNBC hard fumbled in that they didn't even understand what the offer was. The CEO put that on full display and embarrassed the hosts basic knowledge of finance. It was hard to watch.
Can you explain your thought process here? Perhaps we're "embarrassing my basic knowledge of finance", but I wasn't able to follow his math either.
The math doesn't actually math. Even if you're not discounting the cash on hand from GME's value all of GME's market value, plus their cash on hand, plus the "highly confident" $20B still doesn't add up to the take over value in Cohen's letter.
I know it doesn't. But I felt like parent commenter was offering to explain what CNBC and the rest of us didn't understand, that he does.
TLDR: half cash, half stock.
i t ' s o n t h e w e b s i t e . . .
What a bizarre interview that was. The least damaging interpretation is he was intentionally being bad to spite CNBC in a basically (though their explanation doesn't include this) childish fit for earlier bad coverage of GME.
I have absolutely no clue how you could watch the interview and come away with this conclusion. The purpose of an interview is to ask Socratic questions to allow the guest to talk about something of which they have intimate knowledge.
The CEO made it seem like he himself didn't know how the math for the offer worked, and even when presented multiple opportunities to correct that impression, he made no attempt to convince anyone otherwise.
I imagine the actual reason why Cohen didn’t answer the question is that he would have to admit that if the combined entity issued enough shares to pay for the acquisition, it would substantially dilute existing shareholders.
I agree, but he had to know he'd be asked the question, right? And he had to know that staring blankly and mumbling about the offer being on the website wouldn't suffice as an explanation. It's just mind-boggling behavior from the CEO of a public company.
Yes you do. He came away with that conclusion because he entered with that conclusion. When you're already radicalized to a specific outcome, you lose the ability to perform the process of elimination.
In my defense, I had entirely forgotten GME is/was a meme stock. It's been many years since I spent brain cycles thinking about WSB.
> I have absolutely no clue how you could watch the interview and come away with this conclusion.
The reason is pretty apparent. They are bagholders. People like this show up in every thread about Gamestop boasting about how amazing Cohen is in a weirdly personal manner, and have a very fantastical view of how things are going to go -- because their investment depends on it, and they built a literal cult around the idea that GME would make them rich, which necessitates viewing reality a little differently from the rest of us.
For more information, see Dan Olsen's "This is Financial Advice." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5pYeoZaoWrA Its a few years old, but gives you some perspective on the weird cult that has been built around GME.
Edit: Where Ryan Cohen comes in: https://youtu.be/5pYeoZaoWrA?t=6629
If eBay really wanted to sell itself, I’d propose a no reserve auction with the bids starting at $420.
I had the sense this was never a serious, newsworthy story. Just a wild boast that somehow got clicks.
> 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.
Any reasonable person could see this was a ridiculous clown show, put on by the ridiculous clown show meme stock company.
This movie isn't over yet. We'll have to wait and see if GameStop goes full 80's on them with a hostile takeover attempt.
GME had already acquired ~5% of Ebay shares ahead of the offer.
He actually didn't. The majority of that was in options. So he "controlled" 5% via derivatives but this is not the same as owning shares.
Why didn't Cohen buy 100% of eBay shares. What is he, stupid?
Someone call T. Boone Pickens and the Greenwash Boys!
I hope this happens bc they can't even get financing so it would prolong the hilaritiy
Meanwhile they're now working on getting approval to dilute out another billion or so shares:
https://www.sec.gov/ix?doc=/Archives/edgar/data/0001326380/0...
"We are asking our stockholders to approve an amendment to our Third Amended and Restated Certificate of Incorporation, as amended by the Certificate of Amendment dated June 2, 2022 (the “Existing Charter”), to increase the number of authorized shares of our common stock to 2,500,000,000, and correspondingly increase the number of authorized shares of all classes of our stock to 2,505,000,000 for the reasons discussed below. Our Existing Charter currently authorizes the issuance of 1,000,000,000 shares of common stock and 5,000,000 shares of preferred stock."
Cocaine (or whatever their CEO is on) doesn't buy itself.
Edit: Also, the fact that company leadership can get away with this kind of thing, fleecing retail investors for millions/billions of dollars, and face no consequences is...I dunno. I guess it's just normal now. Lawlessness, bribery, favors to the right politicians, lying without hesitation or remorse. People in media clutching their pearls over whatever the Gen Z kids are getting up to on TikTok while this shit is going on is just the icing on the cake.
I thought their stockholders were super into direct registration to trigger the "mother of all short squeezes" when (or so the conspiracy went anyway) all the evil hedge funds would have to buy back their alleged naked shorts for infinite money. That doesn't really play well with Gamestop putting 1.5 billion extra shares on the market, which is basically exactly the reverse of a short squeeze and would surely push down prices.
Or was this a 2022 thing and Gamestop investors have moved on from diamond handing?
They're in an entirely alternate reality where those evil hedge funds did not fleece them for all they're worth. They got had, by GME insiders and by institutional investors. And, lots of people warned them, but they had belief and diamond hands.
I hate that this shit goes unpunished. Though, I guess the apes got mad as hell at anyone that tried to talk them down, or did anything to slow the bleeding.
> I hate that this shit goes unpunished.
The apes did get punished though? And the hedge funds correctly took advantage of irrational behavior by other actors in the market. This is how price-finding in the markets is supposed to work, I can barely call that "evil".
No, I mean the GME insiders who made a bunch of money off the apes, pretending to be on their side. They may be gullible and ignorant about the market (and very annoying online), but it's shady as hell that GME leadership hasn't been forthright about the state of things.
I mean they make a good point -- ebay isn't a serious company anymore. It really needs someone with a vision to rebuild it. That its limping along and executives are essentially bleeding a previously valuable internet asset dry is kind of sad.
They can't rebuild it. Facebook Marketplace is allowing people to buy and sell locally for free with systems for managing fraud that are more robust than Craigslist. How do you rebuild when a way larger company - with a side project of theirs - offers one of your core businesses for free?
eBay has always competed with print and online classifieds. And started the successful Kijiji (in Canada). If what you’re selling is niche enough, local doesn’t work, and has a lot of friction unless it’s something too big to ship.
I like to pay the cheapest price humanly possible but there’s often value in just paying the shipping and online premium. As a seller, it’s easier to put up a posting whenever I feel and stuff it in a box and label it only when I have cash in hand.
+ there’s some geo-arbitrage for sellers: chances are the person willing to pay the most isn’t local to you.
EBay is still more friction than Amazon and eBay commissions are like 16% these days so eBay’s completely lost the giant pie that is mass-manufactured goods.
> ebay isn't a serious company
As opposed to GameStop, which is a literal meme?
Neither is GameStop
Thats not my point. Shinning a light on what eBay could be vs what it is.
Well yeah, if that was your point, no one would need to be correcting you
Pot calling the kettle black. It'd be like Barney Gumble telling Boris Yeltsin what a great president he could be if he cut out the drinking.
The sad part is the offer primarily focussed on how eBay can cut costs when a lot of that spending is probably accretive.
eBay’s biggest issue is their declining online shopping marketshare. They’ve gone from owning nearly the entire market to just losing it.
They're doing a terrible job of preventing scams. Right now there are hundreds of listings for GPUs at too-good-to-be-true prices from sellers with 0 feedback or, worse, from old accounts with positive feedback that have obviously been taken over by scammers (all the feedback is from years ago and about unrelated products). Trust is what eBay brings to the table, when they cede that to scammers, they stop being useful...I can get scammed on TikTok any time I want.
Is this really a big problem for buyers now? Asking genuinely, not rhetorically. In my experience with eBay (my account is 25 years old), the one thing you could count on is that buyers who receive nothing, or get a box of bricks, or broken items or whatever, basically 100% of the time, will get refunded - if necessary, by eBay itself. (This has been frustrating of course for honest sellers who get scammed by buyers.)
So, if they have a ton of scammers now, I would think customers are not being that impacted, and I would have also thought that eBay wouldn’t have too hard a time getting the sellers to pay the refunds, since they tend to withhold the funds from sellers until a little while after the delivery is confirmed.
It makes it feel sketchy. I don't know what the state of buyer protection is. I've read that sellers sometimes list in other countries to get around the PayPal buyer protections or otherwise get paid via some unprotected method.
I can't believe all those hundreds of thousands of listings would continue to exist if there weren't some kind of pay off. Somebody's got to be making money somehow, as it's been happening for ages.
Also, it makes searching difficult. Can't really sort by price anymore, because the lowest prices are almost entirely scams.
It's just a much less pleasant platform when half the listing are fake. This is most extreme on GPUs and RAM, of course, since that's where the feeding frenzy is happening, but it's true of many categories with expensive goods.
> I've read that sellers sometimes list in other countries to get around the PayPal buyer protections
The buyer protections don’t really vary much, but it’s true in some countries they get more protections but it’s more regarding to buyer’s remorse rather than Items Not As Described.
> or otherwise get paid via some unprotected method
At least in North America (and maybe everywhere else), you’ve been required to pay via eBay for all transactions for the last decade or more. No more money orders, bank transfers, cheques or wire transfers or cash. And you can’t easily contact sellers/buyers directly anymore, it’s all through the platform and they block a lot of suspect messages/keywords.
I don't know, man, I just know there's a lot of fake listings on eBay. I don't know what they're getting out of it, but I assume they're not just doing it for fun.
It’s possible the sellers gets their cash out, the customer gets their money back from eBay and eBay is left holding the bag.
Show me any platform that successfully prevented scam.
eBay ten years ago. (At least, much more effectively than now, where a large percentage of listings in some categories are scams.)
Just because they got worse doesn’t mean they were good.
The reason why it’s worse now is that automation of the scammers got better, it was more of a manual job back then.
"Half stock, half cash": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NxD-KGsvPI0
(I couldn't believe myself at first seeing things like these happening and this clip in particular, how does one get millions of dollars for such an disastrously wild interview to me feels quite off to me)
The fact that a guy like this can rise to the level of CEO making millions pretty much sums up everything wrong with the world. I don't think I would trust that guy to make a sandwich.
I would admit that when I had first heard the news (from hackernews) and read its comments, people gave multiple examples and convuluted examples on how this all makes sense and the financial aspects. I was left feeling impressed that perhaps gamestop might've been thinking something new.
Then I watched the video.
> I would trust that guy to make a sandwich.
Don't worry, we are just trusting him with around a measly 11 billion dollars.
This isn't even the worst part by the way, somehow the worst part to me feels like there are people who watched that interview and then somehow got even more convinced within this person/gamestop and publicly glaze him.
To them, I have a question like, are we watching the same interview? How can anyone watch that interview and then consider it in any way positively or anything like that, like huh, have we watched the same interview?
Perhaps some of us at first (like within that HN discussion) were/are trying to justify as if it is some massive brain effort by gamestop or anything and its a 5d chess move ,but to me, this interview showed me what the reality is actually.
>To them, I have a question like, are we watching the same interview? How can anyone watch that interview and then consider it in any way positively or anything like that, like huh, have we watched the same interview?
It all comes down to a belief in "trolling". Once you assume that your chosen individual might act stupid on purpose, you lose the ability to discern between actual stupidity and fake stupidity. GameStop enthusiasts see that interview and assume Cohen is mocking the interviewers as a show of intentional disrespect. They think he's not actually clueless, just trolling.
Unfortunately, this sort of belief is self-reinforcing. Once you get over the hurdle of believing in trolling the first time, the next instance seems completely plausible. Every time it happens, you become more convinced that the person engages in a pattern of trolling — after all, you've seen it so many times! You don't realize that the source of your belief is not accumulated independent evidence, but a chain that rests on a single link.
This is because the community around Gamestop is radicalized by the exact same grievance culture behind the MAGA movement. It even started conveniently in January of 2021, at a point of MAGA's seeming obsolescence. The adherents of this movement have already accepted the final result as guaranteed, and literally every piece of news the world over gets interpreted through the lens of this eventuality that Gamestock's stock price will explode, making them all millionaires and billionaires. Just like MAGA, the community is full of people whose main role is to delegitimize negative news, and reframe it all as instead proof that the mother of all short squeezes is imminent. Today is the perfect day to see this playing out on their subreddits.
They have an entire library regarding their "due diligence" by the way
It's pre-ChatGPT, so people actually wrote all this out (they are reddit posts disguised as books)
https://fliphtml5.com/bookcase/kosyg
Also an fun long form video for anyone interested
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5pYeoZaoWrA
Imagine if the Tesla/X empire went for GME next.
Both are meme stocks, wildly overvalued according to any accounting of fundamentals, so I guess it'd be fitting.
Nice to see one of those heavily leveraged deals turned down.
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)
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.
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...
There's a section of his pay package that says:
Matt Levine's recent opinion piece for Bloomberg ("GameStop Doesn’t Have Enough Stock", https://archive.ph/3h8wf) goes into a bit more detail about it, including why such an acquisition might still help him get there even if it doesn't instantly get him halfway.There's nothing in Ryan Cohen's career that instills confidence to me. He seems like another tech leader that just got lucky at selling their company (which was only unprofitable for the majority of its lifetime until very very recently) during an economic era that is unlikely to return in any of our lifetimes (or our children's lifetimes).
I'm pretty sure this was just a stunt to manipulate both stock prices for some short term play.
It’s been a lot of (unintentional) free advertising for eBay and they’re not even doing a good job of embracing that.
Probably more people than ever have thought of starting a shopping search on eBay than ever (outside pandemic shortages).
.... 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.
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.
What makes it astroturf? You not liking what people said?