GameStop CEO Ryan Cohen's $56B Plan to Take Over eBay

What It Covers

Ryan Cohen, CEO of GameStop, details his $56B unsolicited bid to acquire eBay, outlining three core value-creation strategies: cutting $2B in operating costs, scaling eBay Live into a dominant live-commerce platform, and building the first marketplace for in-game digital items. Cohen also traces his path from founding Chewy to turning around GameStop's retail operations.

Key Questions Answered

• •Supplier negotiation as a profitability signal: Cohen used a counterintuitive metric at Chewy to gauge negotiation effectiveness — if suppliers sent gifts, the company was overpaying; if suppliers expressed frustration or said they never wanted to negotiate again, pricing was optimal. In low-margin retail competing against Amazon, winning on pennies-per-unit cost required treating supplier relationships as transactional rather than relational, even when culturally uncomfortable for the team.
• •Will over skill in hiring: Cohen prioritized drive over credentials when building teams at both Chewy and GameStop. A customer service hire with no relevant background repeatedly applied for a role she appeared unqualified for on paper — her persistence signaled the motivation Cohen valued. His framework: find people willing to operate with the same intensity as the founder, because high performers self-select and reinforce each other once the culture is established.
• •Avoid cross-applying playbooks between different retail models: Cohen initially tried to run GameStop like Chewy — hiring ecommerce talent, pushing online growth — and spent over a year learning it was the wrong approach. Physical retail with non-consumable inventory behaves differently: unsold TVs and games require markdowns, destroying margins. The correction was refocusing on GameStop's core strength in pre-owned goods and collectibles, particularly trading cards with a trade-in model mirroring the hardware buyback system.
• •eBay's $2B cost-cutting opportunity: Cohen identifies eBay's operating expenses as exceeding half of revenues, with $2.4B spent annually on sales and marketing producing zero net user growth — active users have declined by 30 million. His immediate lever is extracting $2B from that cost base before pursuing growth. For context, eBay operates without holding inventory, making this expense ratio a structural inefficiency relative to asset-light marketplace peers.
• •Live commerce as eBay's largest untapped growth vector: eBay Live exists but has an application-based onboarding process that actively blocks content creators from joining. The live commerce total addressable market is estimated at $400B and growing rapidly in the US, following proven scale in Asia. Cohen's plan uses GameStop's 1,600 store locations as creator studios and fulfillment nodes, handling photography, logistics, and authentication so sellers focus exclusively on content creation.
• •In-game digital items as a new marketplace category: No platform currently provides liquidity for in-game assets — skins, weapons, and items accumulated across major titles. Cohen argues these differ from NFTs because they carry genuine in-game utility, not speculative value. EBay's existing infrastructure as the leading marketplace for physical collectibles positions it to extend into digital collectibles, and Cohen believes this addressable market could exceed eBay's entire current physical-goods marketplace in scale.