GME Stock in 2026 – Ryan Cohen’s $9 Billion Gamble Is Either Genius or Pure Madness

Today, it’s quieter to pass a GameStop store in any American mall than it was in the past. There are fewer teenagers pressing their faces against the window and fewer consoles piled in the window. The foot traffic that used to characterize the chain—noisy, impetuous, weekend afternoon energy—has moved elsewhere, primarily to digital storefronts that don’t require people to leave their homes. The physical retail industry is contracting. Everyone is aware of it, even the company.

Despite having about $9 billion in cash on hand, GME’s stock is currently trading at $23 and change, and its CEO is discussing acquisitions that could raise the company’s valuation to the hundreds of billions. At this point, the whole story revolves around the difference between what GameStop is and what Ryan Cohen claims it will become.

For its fiscal 2025 fourth quarter, GameStop reported a non-GAAP adjusted profit of $0.49 per share, a 63% increase over the $0.30 it reported during the same period last year. However, revenue was $1.1 billion, a 14.1% decrease from the previous year. When you compare those two figures, you can learn a lot about Cohen’s true actions within this organization. He is not expanding the retail enterprise. He is making it more efficient by tightening and trimming a store network that was never going to be able to compete with digital distribution. The growth in earnings is genuine. The drop in revenue is just as real. It’s still unclear if that trade-off is sustainable or just a controlled decline.

GameStop’s primary business, which is selling physical copies of games in stores, is directly in the way of the years-long acceleration of the shift to digital downloads. The demand for the console hardware and software that are essential to GameStop has been declining as players have continued to shift their purchasing habits toward digital downloads rather than physical copies, and platforms like Valve’s Steam Deck have grown in popularity. This information is not new. The company’s reaction to it, which increasingly has nothing to do with video games at all, is novel.

Cohen discussed plans to buy a publicly traded consumer company that is much bigger than GameStop in an interview with CNBC. He described the possible deal as “very, very, very big” and “transformational, not just for GameStop, but ultimately within the capital markets.”He went on to make a comparison that surprised a lot of people. “It’s similar to Berkshire Hathaway,” he said, “except what Berkshire did in decades we’re attempting to do in a much shorter time in terms of creating that much value.”

It’s worth pondering for a while because that is a very big claim. It took Warren Buffett fifty years to transform Berkshire Hathaway into what it is today. According to Cohen, GameStop can replicate the structure—if not the entire scale—much more quickly. He might be correct. It’s also possible that this is the most bold statement made by a retail CEO in a very long time.

It seems like the Bitcoin chapter is coming to an end. In January, GameStop moved all of its 4,710 Bitcoin holdings to Coinbase Prime, sparking immediate rumors that the business was getting ready to sell the assets. The company initially purchased those Bitcoin between May 14 and May 23, 2025, at an average price of about $107,900 per BTC.

This amounted to an investment of about $504 million, but its value has since significantly decreased. As usual, Cohen told CNBC that his new acquisition strategy was “way more compelling than bitcoin,” but he declined to confirm whether a sale was imminent. Whatever that means, it implies that the cryptocurrency treasury experiment, which caused controversy when it was first announced and disappointment when the price moved against it, is being discreetly abandoned in favor of something Cohen seems to think is more significant.

The objective is to use GameStop’s capital and operational discipline to make the acquired business much more efficient before possibly moving on to the next target, according to Cohen, who stated that he is searching for a company with an undervalued stock, strong fundamentals, and what he called a “sleepy management team”. There is a logic to that framework, and it is somewhat similar to how some of the more systematic holding companies have developed over time.

The execution is where the uncertainty lies. In a way, Cohen has done this before; he started Chewy from nothing and turned it into a multibillion-dollar business before selling it. However, taking over a sizable, publicly traded consumer company presents a different set of difficulties, and in transactions of that magnitude, there may be a significant discrepancy between the original plan and the final result.

Observing all of this from the outside, it seems like GME stock has evolved into something truly hard to classify. As of early 2026, the company has transformed from a struggling video game retailer into a high-stakes investment vehicle with a multibillion-dollar war chest.

Its CEO receives all of his compensation in the form of stock options, which only vest when GameStop’s market capitalization reaches tiered targets that start at $20 billion and scale to $100 billion. Cohen’s incentives are clearly aligned with shareholders thanks to this structure. It also lets you know how much depends on what happens next.

Notably, Michael Burry, a hedge fund investor best known for shorting the US housing market prior to the 2008 financial crisis, revealed a new investment in GameStop, writing: “I believe in Ryan. Burry’s support is significant. “I like the setup, the governance, and the strategy as I see it.” However, it remains to be seen if Cohen can successfully complete an acquisition of the size he has described and at what cost. The stock has gained 20% so far this year, but it is down about 11% from its peak in 2026. The most honest aspect of GME, a stock that rewards patience and punishes certainty in roughly equal measure, is, in a sense, its volatility.