Top five ways to rationalize GameStop’s bizarre attempt to buy eBay

In case you haven’t been keeping track, GameStop CEO Ryan Cohen has been hustling for the past few weeks to buy eBay, the online action site. It makes sense on paper for the two companies to merge, as they were both premiere spots to buy used games 20 years or so ago, and combining their powers like old, rusty Voltron robots could potentially help them limp together to some sort of financial finish line. 

That said, eBay is worth an estimated 55 billion dollars, and GameStop is worth around 10 billion. So, this was a little like if fast food chain Carl’s Jr. tried to buy Apple, because Apples are foods, and therefore, Apple should let Carl’s Jr. buy it, even though it can’t afford to. 

You may say that’s ridiculous, but it’s no more or less ridiculous than anything Cohen has to say on the topic in the interview below, which is probably why eBay rejected the offer to sell stating it was “neither credible nor attractive”. 

It’s like observing a salmon trying to eat a live grizzly bear. And watching Cohen coldly refuse to say anything substantive while maintaining a disinterested, irritated tone made me feel like I needed to know what was really going on in his mind. Here are my five best guesses, ranked from least to most confident. 

HE WAS TRYING TO GET GAMESTOP STOCK TO DROP AGAIN

This is vast over-simplification of the “Gamestonk” phenomenon from a few years ago, but, in short, like the movie The Big Short, GameStop was doing so badly a while back, that everyone wanted to buy their stock, leading the value of the stock to skyrocket. I think it’s very possible that Cohen was hoping that another berserker move to disrupt the market, like publicly getting mocked by eBay for trying to buy it, may have been another shot at failing so hard that you actually flip around and succeed. GameStop stock is actually down since the failed attempt to buy eBay though, so if that’s the case, Cohen failed.

HE’S SECRETLY MAKING A MOCKUMENTARY ABOUT HIMSELF

Remember when Nathan Fielder made an episode of Nathan For You about opening real coffee shop called “Dumb Starbucks”, claiming that Starbuck couldn’t sue him for copyright infringement because the show was actually a performance art parody of Starbucks? The shop was a massive success and made tons of money in a few days, which people thought was the plan, but in reality, it was all a set-up for an episode of his show that makes fun of business advisors. This was years after when Academy Award-winning Joaquin Phoenix claimed to give up on acting to become a rapper, but in reality, he was just acting like he no longer liked acting for a fake documentary called “I’m Still Here“. 

Could Cohen be secretly working with famed director Jim Jarmusch on a similarly fake documentary where he’s pretending to be the worst CEO in the world for a movie about how awful modern capitalism is? Probably not, but I hope so, because that could actually be a pretty good movie.

HE WAS TRYING TO GOAD EBAY INTO BUYING GAMESTOP, SO HE COULD WORK FOR EBAY

What if that hypothetical salmon in my prior example actually wanted to get eaten, because being eaten by a bear is better than a slow death from starvation? While that analogy doesn’t quite add up, I have to wonder if there is a part of Cohen that was boldly hoping that antagonizing eBay might lead them to strike back out of anger, with a hostile takeover of GameStop leading him to no longer be the top dog of the company, and instead just be another employee. It may sound insane, to want to go from a CEO to a staff member, but my old buddy Niero, former owner of Destructoid, did that exact same thing once upon a time. Sadly, that ended with him getting fired from the company he founded, but he seemed happy at least for a little while there. Which brings me to my next guess. 

HE’S HOPING TO GET FIRED AND GET A SEVERANCE PACKAGE

No matter how you slice it, it really feels like Cohen doesn’t want to be where he is, so it stands to reason that he’s trying to get out in some kind of way. So why doesn’t he just quit? Well, as folks who have ever had powerful positions at a big company can tell you, it’s much better to be laid off than to quit or be fired, because the rich people of the world have normalized the practice to get paid thousands, sometimes millions of dollars, as you’re kicked out the door. It’s called a severance package, sometimes known as a “golden parachute”. The last CEO I knew who got laid of got a 6-million-dollar golden parachute. He spends a lot of time at the beach now.

HE REALLY THOUGHT HE COULD BUY EBAY FOR SOME REASON

Occam’s Razor dictates that the most direct and obvious explanation for a phenomenon is the most likely one. So, when all is said and done, I have to guess that Ryan Cohen really thought that he could buy eBay, without the money, credibility, or skills at persuasion to have any chance at making that happen. People do these kinds of things more than you might think. After I was on Road Rules, my roommate at the time later came into my room and told me to call MTV right now, tell them to give him a show, and to send a full production crew up to Boston to work for him. I said “No”. And he walked away. I think he also asked out Wynona Rider around that same time, who also said no. We’re still good friends, and more so, he’s now the owner of a successful video production studio. So, his failed attempt to will the reality he wanted into existence didn’t work on me in that instance, but that approach eventually worked for him overall in life.

If Cohen is thinking you miss 100% of the shots you don’t take, and it’s just a matter of time before he buys a more successful company, it will be a treat to see which company he’ll try to buy next. My wager is on Nintendo, which is worth about $54 billion, a little less than eBay. He’ll promise to make Star Fox great again by making the animals look more like taxidermy, then have to take that back after seeing Nintendo already did that. Just another whoopsie on this man’s continued failure upward to fame and fortune.