Video game retailer GameStop says it has the best shot at becoming the next Amazon, and the company is ready to make big moves.
The story starts in early February, when GameStop says it began accumulating stock in order to position itself to buy one historic online outlet.
‘eBay should be worth — and will be worth — a lot more money.’
In a press release on Sunday, GameStop said that for the last three months, it has built a 5% economic stake in eBay and is ready to pull the trigger on a sale that would allegedly allow it to challenge Amazon for online superiority.
GameStop’s offer is to buy 100% of eBay at $125 per share in a 50/50 deal of cash and its own GameStop stock. This would total a $55.5 billion takeover.
GameStop CEO Ryan Cohen said that with his expertise, eBay could become a “legit competitor to Amazon.”
The proposal also promises that the newly formed company could reduce its costs by at least $2 billion in just 12 months. This includes cuttings its sales and marketing budget in half, shaving $300 million off of product development, and reducing its administrative costs by $500 million.
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“There is nobody who is more qualified, based on my experience, to run the eBay business,” Cohen said, per Gamespot. “eBay should be worth — and will be worth — a lot more money. I’m thinking about turning eBay into something worth hundreds of billions of dollars.”
GameStop boasted a massive turnaround under Cohen, who is credited with taking a fiscal year 2021 net loss of $381 million and turning it into a FY 2025 net income of $418 million.
This came off the back of the meme stock craze, a moment in 2021 when online forums — predominantly Reddit — rallied around a flailing GameStop and kept it alive for nostalgic reasons. The amazing part about the story is that GameStop has been able to keep that momentum alive for all these years.
The company was at historic lows in 2020, sometimes trading at less than a dollar per share. By December 2020, shares had risen to over $4 before the company’s portfolio exploded in the next month.
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By January 1, 2021, shares were worth $81.25 before an inevitable sell-off. However, the company is still sitting at around $25 per share, double what it was in 2013 and about $10 higher than 2007, when physical video game sales were still a formidable source of income.
According to Marketplace, GameStop is still composed of mostly retail investors who own about 90% of its stock. This could pay off monstrously if CEO Cohen gets his way, as eBay’s own stock has more than doubled since 2024.
Both companies seem poised to continue their rise so long as resales of media and tech trend upward, while a trading card boom continues to permeate throughout the collector’s world, where both companies can thrive.
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