GameStop bought 10% of eBay, and a hostile takeover might come next
Ryan Cohen just spent about $5 billion — half of GameStop’s market cap — on 9.8% of eBay, a company that already rejected him. The takeover is a long shot. The logic behind it isn’t: both sell secondhand collectibles, and both are losing to apps like Whatnot.
GameStop owns nearly 10% of eBay now.
Friday’s SEC filing put CEO Ryan Cohen‘s stake at 9.8% — about $5 billion, or half of GameStop’s entire market cap. eBay already told him his bid was “neither credible nor attractive.” He bought more anyway.
“We’re coming for eBay one way or another,” he told Bloomberg, then filed the transcript with the SEC like a receipt.
The takeover is nuts. The idea under it isn’t. Those are two different things and everyone’s only covering the first one.
GameStop isn’t a game store anymore
Cohen said it flat out this week: physical software is “less than 12%” of the business. Collectibles are “over half.” Sony’s killing PlayStation discs in 2028 and he called it “totally irrelevant.”
The chain that sold you Halo is a Pokémon card pawnshop now. And it’s working — GameStop just posted the highest earnings in its history with a fraction of the stores. Cohen gutted it into a lean, cash-rich machine.
The problem is what to do with the cash. You can’t grow by shrinking forever. So he’s shopping.
The man does not lose interest
He walked away from a $35 billion pay package to keep chasing this. Thirty-five billion.
Now he’s using GameStop itself as the piggy bank — selling shares to meme-stock believers, converting the proceeds into eBay stock, betting that if a deal ever looks viable, Wall Street funds the rest for a cut. A takeover run on tenacity and Reddit.
eBay’s board doesn’t want him. Cohen treats that as a “yet.”
Why it’s not actually crazy
GameStop and eBay are the same business now. One sells secondhand collectibles from stores. The other is the internet’s oldest secondhand-collectibles marketplace. One has trade-in counters, the other has 130 million buyers.
And they share an enemy: Whatnot.
The live-shopping app — real-time video auctions for cards, sneakers, collectibles — did over $3 billion in 2024 and is still climbing. Live commerce is eating the resale market, and both GameStop and eBay are outside it looking in.
Cohen named it himself. Buried in his Bloomberg word-salad was the real pitch: “live commerce and building out an in-game visual marketplace.” He’s right. The future of flipping a graded Charizard isn’t a store or a static listing. It’s a livestream. eBay’s got the inventory; GameStop’s got locations that could authenticate and ship. Together, that’s a Whatnot competitor with scale neither has alone.
The catch is the entire how
You still can’t buy a company that said no by owning 10% and wanting it badly.
Pressed for a plan, Cohen offered the plan is to make money and refused the rest. His cost-cutting means mass layoffs at eBay, which makes any board dig in. And funding a multibillion-dollar hostile bid by selling pawnshop stock is not in any textbook.
So both are true. The strategy is sound. The method is one of the weirdest corporate maneuvers in years.
What it comes down to
Cohen bet half his company on a deal the other company doesn’t want, to chase a future both are losing. The press keeps writing it as a joke because the how is a joke.
The why isn’t. eBay and GameStop are the same dying-format business, Whatnot’s eating them both, and merged they’d at least have a shot. He might be wrong about how to get there. He’s not wrong about the target.
Betting against his patience has lost money for six years straight.
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Article compiled and edited by Derek Gibbs (entertainment editor) and the Clownfish TV newsroom.
Hat Tips:
Kotaku and GameStop’s SEC filings (July 18, 2026), verified GameStop’s 9.8% eBay stake worth roughly $5 billion or half its market cap, Cohen’s “coming for eBay one way or another” Bloomberg comment filed with the SEC, eBay’s “neither credible nor attractive” rejection, Cohen’s stated interest in “live commerce and building out an in-game visual marketplace,” his figures of “less than 12%” software and “over half” collectibles, his “totally irrelevant” dismissal of Sony ending discs, GameStop’s record earnings with fewer stores, and his abandonment of a $35 billion pay package to pursue the bid
Industry reporting on live commerce (2024-2026), verified for context on Whatnot surpassing $3 billion in sales and live commerce reshaping collectibles resale, as backdrop to the proposed combination