Ryan Cohen Is Trying to Eat eBay With a Meme Stock — And Wall Street Can't Look Away

Ryan Cohen is trying to buy eBay with a meme stock. Let that sentence rattle around in your skull for a second. GameStop — ticker GME, market cap roughly $7 billion — just went fully hostile on a $56 billion takeover bid for eBay. The same eBay that's worth $94 billion. The same eBay that's been around since the dial-up era. The same eBay whose board called Cohen's offer "neither credible nor attractive" and then watched him buy more stock anyway.

This isn't a negotiation. This is a siege.

The Timeline of Audacity

Early May, Cohen floats a $56 billion bid through GameStop. Wall Street laughs. Mid-May, eBay's board formally rejects it — standard procedure, nothing to see here. Late May, Cohen increases GME's stake in eBay and signals he's willing to go fully hostile. June 3, GameStop drops a bombshell: record profits and a $2 billion buyback authorization. The stock jumps 10%. He's not retreating — he's reloading.

Then June 8: Cohen formally signals willingness to pursue a hostile bid. And Michael Burry — the guy who saw 2008 coming — reportedly says the bid "just went hostile" after Cohen claims eBay banned him from its platform. You can't make this up.

The Math Is Insane (And That's the Point)

GME at $22.26/share, market cap ~$7 billion. EBAY at $108.44/share, market cap ~$94 billion. Cohen's bid: $56 billion. That's 13x GameStop's entire market cap — and only about 60% of what eBay is actually worth. The market isn't pricing in a deal. The gap between $56 billion and $94 billion tells you everything.

To actually pull this off, Cohen would need either a massive debt financing package — we're talking tens of billions — or a substantially higher bid that eBay's institutional shareholders might actually consider. Neither is easy. Both are exactly the kind of thing Cohen has spent his career convincing people he can do.

The Cohen Playbook

First: build a profitable base business. Check. GameStop is now profitable, something nobody thought possible three years ago. Second: accumulate cash. That $2 billion buyback authorization? It's also a signal — GME has a war chest. Third: take a stake in the target. Done. Fourth: go public with the bid to build retail shareholder pressure. Done, loudly. Fifth: rally the Reddit army.

The retail angle is the X-factor here. Cohen isn't just a CEO — he's a folk hero to millions of retail traders who've been ride-or-die since 2021. If he can convince eBay's retail shareholders that he'd run the company better, he doesn't need every institutional vote. He just needs enough.

"eBay has been a zombie for years — stagnant growth, underinvested, coasting on network effects from 2005. Cohen's pitch is brutally simple: I can run this better."

Can He Actually Pull This Off?

Probably not — but "probably not" has never stopped Ryan Cohen before. The guy turned a dying mall retailer into a profitable company with a $2 billion cash pile. He convinced an army of retail traders to hold a stock through a short squeeze that nearly broke the financial system. Underestimating him has been the single most expensive trade on Wall Street for three years running.

If Cohen gets eBay to the negotiating table — even at $70-80 billion — it would be the most improbable hostile takeover in modern history. The meme stock that swallowed a dot-com dinosaur. The guy who posted frog emojis and ended up running a $94 billion marketplace.

eBay's institutional holders aren't Reddit traders. They'll want a real premium, not vibes. But vibes have a funny way of becoming reality when Ryan Cohen is involved. Watch this space. The siege is just beginning.

— The Signal