GameStop CEO Ryan Cohen’s $56B Plan to Take Over eBay
In a Nutshell
Ryan Cohen is attempting a $56 billion takeover of eBay to combine it with GameStop's collectibles business, arguing eBay has stagnated under professional management with rising costs, flat revenue, and declining GMV despite massive e-commerce growth. He plans to cut $2 billion in operating expenses, expand live commerce using eBay's physical stores as fulfillment nodes, and build a digital collectibles marketplace for in-game items. Cohen is personally investing $500 million and states he will pursue any means necessary—including going hostile—since eBay management refuses to engage and has no skin in the game.
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Everyone hates GameStop and the media wants the company to fail. Board members make hundreds of thousands of dollars annually without buying stock with their own money and only attend a handful of meetings. Management is grossly overpaid. The speaker emphasizes that nothing is more American than risking your own capital and questions why everyone wants GameStop to fail.
Ryan Cohen joins the All-In Interview. The host notes it has been about a decade since their last dinner in New York. Cohen is currently attempting to acquire and run eBay, a significant story that connects back to the early days of the internet 25-30 years ago.
Cohen originally planned to launch an online jewelry website. He attended trade shows and purchased hundreds of thousands of dollars in inventory before building the website and distribution. While shopping at a neighborhood pet store with his poodle, he realized he understood pet products better. Key factors that attracted him to the pet category included:
- Recurring revenue purchases
- A still-fragmented market with neighborhood pet stores that Petco and PetSmart had not yet fully disrupted
- Amazon had offered pet products since the 1990s but had not achieved significant scale in the category
The vision was to replicate the neighborhood pet store experience online at scale. Cohen studied Amazon's supply chain best practices including fast shipping, broad selection, and competitive pricing, while combining this with deep product knowledge from the pet store model. The entire team consisted of pet owners, creating genuine passion for the category.
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