GameStop Offers $56B to Buy eBay
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- GameStop made an unsolicited ~$56B cash-and-stock offer to buy eBay at $125/share, a ~20% premium over eBay's May 1 closing price, after quietly building a ~5% stake in the target.
- eBay confirmed receipt of the proposal and said its board and financial advisers would review it, stopping short of accepting or rejecting the approach.
- Ryan Cohen, GameStop's CEO, is driving the acquisition push — the same executive whose prior eBay holdings and activist-investor track record at Chewy set the template for the GameStop turnaround.
- Coverage converged across financial (WSJ, Reuters, FT, Bloomberg), gaming (Kotaku, IGN, Polygon), and crypto outlets (Bitcoin News, Cointelegraph, crypto.news), with France 24 and others explicitly framing it as a potential Amazon-rival play.
- The proposal lit up GameStop's meme-stock Reddit communities — r/Superstonk, r/GME, r/DeepFuckingValue, and r/gme_meltdown all posted confirmation threads — an angle the mainstream financial framing tends to gloss over.
Why it matters: GameStop's $56B unsolicited offer for eBay — at a ~20% premium and led by CEO Ryan Cohen — represents the gaming retailer's boldest pivot yet, with eBay's board review now the decisive next step for a deal that would create a US e-commerce player of unusual scale.
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