You might need a moment to let this one sink in. The same GameStop that was dangling on the edge of bankruptcy just a few years ago – the same company that Reddit turned into a meme-stock circus in 2021 – is now trying to buy eBay for $56 billion. Yes, that eBay. The one your parents used to sell old CDs on. And if Ryan Cohen gets his way, he wants to turn the whole thing into Amazon’s most serious rival.

On Sunday, May 3, GameStop filed a formal, non-binding and unsolicited offer to acquire 100% of eBay at $125 per share – a price that carries roughly a 20% premium over eBay’s closing stock price of $104 on Friday, May 1. The deal is structured as a 50/50 split – half in cash, half in GameStop stock – and the total value comes out to approximately $55.5 billion. To make that work financially, GameStop has reportedly already locked in a commitment letter from TD Bank to provide around $20 billion in debt financing for the transaction. Cohen has also hinted he may reach out to Middle Eastern sovereign-wealth funds for additional backing if needed.

What makes this offer genuinely jaw-dropping isn’t just the number – it’s the sheer audacity of the size mismatch. GameStop’s own market cap sits at around $12 billion, while eBay’s is valued closer to $46 billion. That means Cohen is attempting to swallow a company nearly four times his own size. In the mergers and acquisitions world, this kind of move is rare. It requires mountains of leverage, significant stock dilution, and an ironclad belief that the combined entity will be worth far more than the sum of its parts. Cohen clearly believes that.

None of this should really surprise anyone who has followed Ryan Cohen closely. This is the guy who built Chewy, the pet supplies e-tailer, from scratch and sold it to PetSmart for $3.35 billion in 2017. He then quietly accumulated a massive stake in GameStop, forced his way onto its board in early 2021, and eventually took over as CEO – steering the company through one of the most chaotic periods in Wall Street history. Under his watch, GameStop went from posting a $381 million net loss in fiscal 2021 to recording a $418 million net income in fiscal 2025. He also slashed SG&A expenses by roughly $800 million – a 47% cut – eliminated the company’s debt entirely, and raised $3.2 billion in long-term capital at a 0% interest rate. So when Cohen says he has a plan, there’s at least a track record behind it.

In his open letter to eBay’s Board of Directors and in his interview with The Wall Street Journal, Cohen laid out his vision clearly: GameStop’s roughly 1,600 US retail locations would become a national network for authentication, item intake, fulfillment, and live commerce events for eBay sellers. Think about what that could look like in practice – instead of mailing in a vintage game console or a rare Pokémon card to get it graded and listed, a seller could just walk into their local GameStop. The stores, which have already been pivoting toward collectibles and trading cards, would become physical nodes in a much larger digital marketplace.

The live commerce angle is also worth paying attention to. Cohen told the WSJ that he believes eBay needs to go harder into live shopping – think real-time video streams where brands and individual sellers show off products directly to buyers. This is already massive in East Asia and has been slowly gaining traction in the US. If a merged GameStop-eBay entity could crack that format at scale, it could genuinely eat into Amazon‘s dominance in certain product categories, particularly used goods, collectibles, and electronics resale.

Cohen also confirmed that GameStop has been quietly building a position in eBay since at least February 4, 2026, when it started purchasing shares. The company currently holds a 5% economic stake in eBay through a mix of derivatives and direct stock ownership. That level of commitment – accumulating a 5% stake before even making a public offer – signals this isn’t a casual moonshot. This was planned. The offer also represents a 46% premium over eBay’s closing price before GameStop began buying shares, and a 27% premium over eBay’s 30-day volume-weighted average price.

As of right now, eBay has not made any public statement about the offer. That silence isn’t unusual – boards typically take time to evaluate offers before responding publicly. But Cohen has made clear that patience has its limits. He told the WSJ he’s fully prepared to go hostile – taking the bid directly to eBay’s shareholders through a proxy fight if the board chooses to reject or ignore him. That’s a significant threat, and one that eBay’s directors will take seriously.

Not everyone is convinced the deal makes sense, of course. Bloomberg Intelligence analysts Poonam Goyal and Sydney Goodman noted that while GameStop and eBay do have some overlap in collectibles and resale, they see a “low probability of a deal“. They flagged the substantial dilution that any credible offer would require, along with the “meaningful execution risk” that comes with merging two very different kinds of companies. GameStop is primarily a brick-and-mortar retail chain that has been slowly reinventing itself. eBay is a global digital marketplace with hundreds of millions of active users. Making those two things work together – culturally, operationally, technologically – is a massive lift.

Still, it’s hard to look at Ryan Cohen’s track record and dismiss the idea out of hand. He has made a habit of doing things people said couldn’t be done. He turned a dying pet supply startup into a multi-billion-dollar exit. He took a meme stock and turned it profitable. And now he’s staring down one of the most storied names in e-commerce history, offering to run the combined company as CEO – reportedly for free. That last detail is either an act of supreme confidence or a very clever bit of optics, but either way it’s the kind of move that gets people’s attention.

The bigger question hanging over all of this is whether eBay actually wants to be saved – or whether it even sees itself as needing saving. eBay has had a quiet few years. It’s not in crisis, but it’s also not exactly growing at the kind of pace that makes headlines. Amazon has pulled far ahead in general merchandise. Etsy has carved out a stronger identity in handmade and vintage goods. And newer players in live and social commerce are making noise in categories eBay used to own. Cohen’s pitch, stripped to its core, is this: eBay has the brand, the user base, and the infrastructure. GameStop has the physical footprint and the execution playbook. Together, they could build something that neither could build alone.

Whether eBay’s board agrees with that pitch – or whether Cohen will be forced to take his case directly to shareholders – is the story to watch from here.