EBay stock surged approximately 14 percent in after-hours trading on Friday May 1, 2026, after the Wall Street Journal reported that GameStop Corp is preparing a takeover bid for the company.
GameStop rose approximately 4 percent on the same news. Neither company’s representatives responded to requests for comment from the Journal or from other outlets that quickly followed the report.
The deal, if it happens, would be one of the more surprising corporate transactions in recent memory, a $12 billion video game retailer with a mountain of cash attempting to acquire a $46 billion online marketplace that most people associate with used goods, collectibles and finding things they cannot find anywhere else.
Ryan Cohen, GameStop’s CEO, is the man behind the idea.
He has been quietly building a position in eBay’s shares and plans to make an offer to eBay’s board as early as later this month.
What Did The Wall Street Journal Report?
The Journal’s report, citing people familiar with the matter, said GameStop has been accumulating eBay shares in recent weeks ahead of a formal offer.
The specific terms of any offer, price, structure, financing, were not available. What the Journal described is a strategic ambition rather than a completed negotiation.
GameStop intends to make an offer, eBay’s board will then decide whether to engage, and if eBay is not receptive, Cohen may take his proposal directly to eBay’s shareholders.
That last detail, the shareholder vote threat, is important. Cohen has a massive retail investor following built over years of meme stock culture.
GameStop’s stock became one of the most famous short squeezes in Wall Street history in January 2021 when retail investors coordinated on Reddit to drive the price from around $20 to nearly $500 in days, causing billions in losses for hedge funds that had bet against the company.
Cohen was at the center of that moment, and the community that formed around it has not dispersed.
If he needs to take an offer directly to eBay’s shareholders and rally retail investors to pressure the board, he has a demonstrated ability to do exactly that.
Who Is Ryan Cohen?
Ryan Cohen is 40 years old and has one of the more interesting recent histories in American business.
He co-founded Chewy, the online pet supplies retailer, grew it into a business that sold to PetSmart for $3.35 billion in 2017, and then looked for the next challenge.
He found it in GameStop. In late 2020, he began building a stake in the dying brick-and-mortar video game retailer, eventually becoming its largest shareholder with approximately 9 percent of the company.
He joined the board in 2021, became chairman, and eventually became CEO in 2023.
By that point, GameStop had been transformed, not in the sense that its underlying business was thriving, but in the sense that Cohen had used the meme stock phenomenon to raise billions of dollars through stock offerings at inflated prices, eliminating the company’s debt and filling its balance sheet with cash.
As of March 2026, GameStop had approximately $9 billion in cash reserves.
A company with $9 billion in cash and a $12 billion market capitalization is not a traditional retailer sitting on an empty balance sheet.
It is a vehicle. The question has always been: what does Cohen do with the vehicle?
In January 2026, he provided the first public hint. He told the Wall Street Journal he was considering a “significant acquisition of a publicly traded company in the consumer or retail sector.”
He described the potential move with characteristic self-awareness, either “genius or totally, totally foolish.” He was clearly considering something. eBay, it appears, is that something.
Why EBay Makes Sense For Gamestop
The strategic overlap between GameStop and eBay is real and worth understanding. GameStop, as it has evolved under Cohen, is no longer primarily a store where you buy new video game discs.
It has pivoted aggressively toward collectibles, trading cards, figurines, limited-release toys, hard-to-find items that carry scarcity value.
The core GameStop customer in 2026 is someone who cares deeply about specific items, values rarity, and will pay a premium for the right thing.
eBay has been making the same pivot from the other direction. The platform has spent years leaning into collectibles, sneakers, authenticated luxury goods and used items, the categories where buyers cannot simply go to Amazon and buy the thing they want.
EBay built an authentication service for high-value sneakers and trading cards. It has pushed into the secondary market for collectibles with specific energy. The overlap with GameStop’s customer base is genuine.
Both companies have struggled with the same underlying challenge: adapting to a world where their original proposition, GameStop’s physical disc sales, eBay’s general secondhand marketplace, has been eroded by competition.
Both have been searching for a definition of what they are that justifies their continued existence as major platforms.
Cohen’s vision, per the Journal, is to combine them into a retail juggernaut, a platform with the marketplace infrastructure of eBay, the collectibles focus of the new GameStop, and the brand energy that Cohen’s meme stock community brings to any company he is associated with.
His stated goal is a $100 billion-plus valuation. That is an ambitious target for a combined entity whose current combined market cap is approximately $58 billion.
The Problem With The Math
There is an obvious structural challenge in the proposed transaction that every analyst and investor is going to focus on. GameStop has approximately $9 billion in cash, and eBay is worth approximately $46 billion.
Even giving GameStop full credit for its cash reserves and assuming its own stock as acquisition currency, the gap between what GameStop can easily deploy and what eBay costs is substantial.
The specific financing structure of any offer has not been disclosed. Cohen could structure a deal using GameStop stock as partial currency, eBay shareholders receive GameStop shares alongside cash.
He could pursue debt financing to supplement the cash. He could pursue a split transaction in which eBay’s board receives one structure and shareholders another.
None of this has been detailed because the offer has not formally been made.
What the report establishes is intent and approach, Cohen has been accumulating a position, he plans to make an offer this month, and he will take the offer public if the board resists.
The mechanics of how a $12 billion company acquires a $46 billion one are the subject of negotiations that have not yet formally begun.
What EBay’s Board Will Have To Consider
EBay’s board has received no formal offer as of the Journal’s report. When and if one arrives, its members will face a specific set of questions.
Is the offered premium meaningful relative to where eBay’s stock was before Friday’s after-hours move?
Does the strategic vision Cohen is pitching, a collectibles and retail juggernaut combining both platforms, represent a credible path to value creation?
If the answer to either question is uncertain, is the risk of a proxy battle with a CEO who has demonstrated the ability to move markets worth taking?
The 14 percent after-hours move in eBay stock on a report alone, with no confirmed offer, no price, no terms, speaks to the market’s interpretation of the situation.
Investors who bought eBay at Friday’s close and held through after-hours are already up significantly on the news.
That creates its own pressure. If a formal offer comes in above Friday’s pre-news closing price but below the after-hours high, the board will need to explain to shareholders why they should accept.
GameStop and eBay both declined to comment.
The Journal’s report cites unnamed people familiar with the matter. This is where the situation stands: a report, two stocks that moved significantly on it, and a formal offer that has not yet arrived.
