The eBay Acquisition Bid That Wall Street Doesn’t Believe Will Happen

The late-night announcement on May 3 had all the characteristics of a certain type of corporate drama that only occurs once every few years. GameStop, a retailer of video games with a market value of about $11.9 billion, announced that it was making a $55.5 billion offer to acquire eBay, a business that is approximately four times more valuable. Excitement was not the initial response on trading desks. It was incredulity.

GameStop’s stock fell more than ten percent by Monday’s close, while eBay’s stock increased by roughly five percent to settle close to $109, well short of the $125 offer. It was obvious that investors weren’t pricing in a profitable transaction. The discrepancy between the offer and the market’s response revealed its own subtle message: the Street does not think this deal will close on the terms offered, if at all.

The majority of the skepticism starts with the financing math. In addition to a “highly-confident” letter from TD Securities regarding up to $20 billion in debt, GameStop has about $9.4 billion in cash. You get close to $40 billion when you include the company’s own market capitalization, which is approximately $11 billion. $55.5 billion is the suggested amount. Ryan Cohen’s only public response to the sixteen-billion-dollar gap has been that GameStop has “the ability to issue stock” to close it. Cohen said he didn’t understand Becky Quick’s direct question about the source of the remaining funds on CNBC’s Squawk Box on Monday morning. The interview was brief, tense, and strangely evasive.

It’s difficult to ignore the parallel. eBay has made numerous acquisitions throughout its history, including GSI Commerce for $2.4 billion in 2011, PayPal for $1.5 billion in 2002, and Skype for $4.1 billion in 2005. Eventually, the majority of those were spun off or unwound. For almost thirty years, the company has been an acquirer. It is now, for the first time, on the other side of the table, being courted by a buyer that many would consider unlikely.

When eBay was first introduced in 1995 as a digital marketplace for hobbyists, its DNA—collectors, resellers, vintage sellers, the long tail of online commerce—remains. However, due to Amazon’s gravitational pull, the number of active users has gradually decreased from 175 million in 2018 to roughly 136 million today. In general, Cohen argues that eBay is squandering money. He emphasized that eBay gained just one million net new customers in fiscal 2025 despite spending $2.4 billion on sales and marketing; this figure is so tiny that it almost seems like a rounding error. He claims that if you cut that, earnings could almost double.

Repurposing GameStop’s approximately 1,600 U.S. locations as drop-off, intake, and authentication hubs—including hosting live commerce broadcasts straight from store floors—is the idea he is pitching. It’s a creative concept that sounds good in a press release but is more difficult to implement in real life. The two business models, according to Morgan Stanley, are “fundamentally different.” According to Bernstein, it would be “surprised if anything became of it.” Sucharita Kodali of Forrester put it succinctly: it’s primarily a means for GameStop to connect itself to a bigger narrative.

The board of eBay has acknowledged receiving the proposal and promised to thoroughly examine it. It’s genuinely unclear if that review results in a genuine conversation or a courteous rejection. As this develops, there’s a feeling that the offer is more significant for what it signifies than for what it is; Cohen’s aspirations are no longer modest, and the boldness of the meme era has evolved into something stranger and more significant. It remains to be seen if the market will ever accept that.