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GameStop of Thrones

Meme stock king Ryan Cohen is the laughingstock of Wall Street after launching an absurd bid to buy eBay for $56 billion—largely with cash and equity that GameStop doesn’t have. The market isn’t taking the proposal seriously, but the math itself is actually pretty interesting…

Ryan Cohen
Cohen—GameStop’s largest individual shareholder, with around a 9 percent stake—is trying to lift a page from the Mike Milken playbook. Photo: Bill Jerome/Wikimedia Commons
William D. Cohan
May 6, 2026

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On Monday morning, I witnessed one of the worst corporate executive performances in the history of TV. (I’ve seen more than a few.) Ryan Cohen, the chairman and C.E.O. of GameStop, was on CNBC, presumably to explain the logic of his company’s unsolicited bid for eBay. The morning crew—Andrew Ross Sorkin, Becky Quick, Mike Santoli, and Melissa Lee—had questions. It’s not every day that a company like GameStop, with a market capitalization of around $10.6 billion, tries to take over one with a market cap of around $50 billion. It’s even rarer when the would-be acquirer has been little more than a meme stock for years.