GameStop CEO Ryan Cohen has failed to say exactly where he’s going to get all the money he needs to buy eBay for $56 billion, in a bizarre new interview in which he continued to say he didn't understand the questions he was being asked.
Yesterday, GameStop made an unsolicited $55.5 billion offer to buy eBay at $125.00 per share in cash and stock. Cohen, who would become CEO of the combined company should the deal go through, told The Wall Street Journal he wants to make eBay a “legit competitor to Amazon,” as he bids to grow his business beyond games and collectibles and hit a $35 billion payout in the process.
GameStop said the cash part of the offer is expected to be funded from a combination of cash and liquid investments on GameStop’s balance sheet, which totaled $9.4 billion as of January 31, 2026, and “third-party acquisition financing,” with up to $20 billion in debt financing from TD Securities.
With GameStop currently valued at $10.69 billion (assuming GameStop is providing all its stock for the deal), Cohen is looking at a $16 billion shortfall. So, you’d imagine he’d have a clear plan for that $16 billion. But in an interview with CNBC’s Squawk Box programme, Cohen repeatedly refused to say where the money would come from, insisting he didn’t understand the line of questioning and repeatedly pointing to the GameStop website.
“It’s on our website. It’s half cash, half stock. But the details are on our website,” Cohen replied when interviewer Andrew Ross Sorkin asked to make “the math math.”
When the shortfall was broken down in plain terms, all Cohen could reply was: “we’ll see what happens.”
Sorkin, clearly struggling to work out how to get Cohen to detail his plan, asked, plainly, where the rest of the money would come from. “It’s half cash. Half stock,” Cohen replied.
At this point, one of Sorkin’s co-presenters came in to repeat the question: where is the rest of the money going to come from?
“I don’t understand your question,” is all Cohen offered. “We’re offering half cash, half stock. And we have the ability to issue stock in order to get the deal done. But the full details of the offer are on our website.”
That suggests that the proposed deal could require significant share issuances and massively dilute existing shareholders.
Cohen was then asked, one last time, for more insight because he was on air. “I don’t understand your question," he replied, repeating himself.
Perhaps wisely moving on, Cohen was asked how GameStop could make eBay “a legit competitor to Amazon,” as he has says.
“There’s an opportunity to build a much larger business, to make the business much more efficient and to accelerate revenue growth,” Cohen replied. “eBay is a very strong business. GameStop, very difficult business. Should have been bankrupt multiple times over. And it’s doing okay. It’s making a few bucks. eBay is in a very very strong position, but it could be in a much stronger position. And it could be a much larger business than it currently is.”
“We are offering half cash, half stock, and we have the ability to issue stock in order to get the deal done," says $GME CEO @ryancohen on offering a bid for @eBay.
Watch the full interview: https://t.co/EMOmPbQiia pic.twitter.com/zFtKejJ7x2
— Squawk Box (@SquawkCNBC) May 4, 2026
And that’s where the interview ends, leaving us basically where we started. The Wall Street Journal has said Cohen may turn to Middle Eastern sovereign-wealth funds to plug the money gap, but he failed to suggest that would be the case in the interview.
Will eBay go for the deal? The auction website told IGN it had no discussions with or outreach from GameStop prior to receiving the proposal, but it said its Board of Directors, in consultation with its financial and legal advisors, “will carefully review and consider the unsolicited proposal to determine the course of action that it believes is in the best interests of the company and all eBay shareholders.”
“The Board will review this proposal with a focus on the value to be delivered to eBay shareholders, including the value of the GameStop stock consideration and the ability of GameStop to deliver a binding, actionable proposal,” eBay continued.
It’s worth noting that Cohen could make up to $35 billion in stock if the company’s market value hits $100 billion, among other compensation package criteria. In January, the 40-year-old billionaire told The Wall Street Journal he wanted a “big” deal that is “ultimately either going to be genius or totally, totally foolish.”
As of January, Cohen had a stake of over 9% in GameStop and was its biggest individual shareholder. Investor Michael Burry, who owns shares in the company, said earlier this year that Cohen “has a crappy business, and he is milking it best he can while taking advantage of the meme stock phenomenon to raise cash and wait for an opportunity to make a big buy of a real growing cash cow business.”
At the beginning of 2025, GameStop had around 2,325 locations in the U.S., but by the end of the year it had closed 590 of them. It then kicked off 2026 by closing even more stores as part of an effort to reduce costs.
For years now some have called GameStop a dying bricks and mortar retailer as it looks to new and often bizarre ways to generate revenue. August 2023 saw the company pull out of crypto, and it shut its short-lived NFT marketplace just a few months later. More recently (and much to the dismay of its employees), GameStop held its first-ever Trade Anything Day, which saw customers bringing in literally anything for trade-in credit at their local stores.
Image credit: CNBC / YouTube.
Wesley is Director, News at IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.
