GameStop made an unsolicited $55.5 billion bid to acquire eBay, offering $125 a share split evenly between cash and stock. The bid, valued at £41 billion, was disclosed in a letter from GameStop Chief Executive Officer Ryan Cohen to eBay chair Paul Pressler.

GameStop, which carried a market valuation of roughly $12 billion before the bid, is seeking to acquire a company with a market value of about $46 billion. The video game retailer had quietly accumulated a 5% stake in eBay ahead of the offer, which is backed by a $20 billion bank loan from TD Securities. Cohen could also turn to external investors including Middle Eastern sovereign wealth funds. Shares of eBay rose about 10% in extended trading after news of the potential offer, while GameStop's shares gained 7%.

"Ebay should be worth – and will be worth – a lot more money," Cohen said in the letter. "I'm thinking about turning eBay into something worth hundreds of billions of dollars. It could be a legit competitor to Amazon."

He said he would immediately launch a cost-cutting program to slash $2 billion of spending per year. The plan would cut $1.2 billion from eBay's annual sales and marketing budget, $300 million from product development, and $500 million from administrative departments.

"More spend is not producing more users on a marketplace with near-universal brand recognition," he said, noting that eBay spent $2.4 billion on sales and marketing in 2025 while seeing only a 0.75% net increase in active buyers. "Our board unanimously supports this proposal," he said.

Cohen, who has run GameStop since 2020, said he was prepared to take the offer directly to eBay shareholders, turning the bid hostile if eBay's board was not receptive. GameStop could submit a formal offer as soon as later this month.

He said GameStop's remaining stores would offer eBay a national network for authentication, intake, fulfilment, and live commerce. A slide deck accompanying the offer said the stores could serve as drop-off and shipping nodes and double as broadcasting studios for livestreamed auctions. GameStop shut 590 stores in 2025 and has 1,600 remaining locations.

eBay reported first-quarter revenue of $3.09 billion, beating analysts' estimate of $3.04 billion, and expects second-quarter revenue to beat Wall Street forecasts due to demand for collectibles and the growing popularity of live-streamed auctions. eBay is acquiring the Depop app from Etsy for about $1.2 billion in cash.

In January, GameStop unveiled a compensation package worth roughly $35 billion for Cohen, tied to lifting GameStop's market capitalization to $100 billion and achieving $10 billion in cumulative performance EBITDA. GameStop became prominent during the meme-stock trading period of 2021, when its shares rose from $3.25 in April 2020 to $347.50 in late January 2021.