GameStop May Drop Its $56 Billion eBay Bid in Favor of a Partnership

GameStop CEO Ryan Cohen is reportedly reconsidering his $56 billion bid to acquire eBay, with Bloomberg reporting that he may pull the offer entirely and pivot to a partnership or joint venture instead. The news lands roughly three months after eBay's board flatly rejected the original proposal.

Under the partnership scenario, GameStop would offer eBay access to its roughly 1,600 US retail stores in exchange for a seat on eBay's board. Cohen has also floated the idea of using eBay as a platform to sell digital in-game items, which he described as "massive." The original acquisition offer — made in May 2026 — was $125 per share, split 50% cash and 50% GameStop stock, valuing eBay at around $55.5–56 billion. Cohen had lined up a claimed $20 billion in debt financing from TD Bank and pointed to GameStop's $9 billion cash reserve, with the remaining gap supposedly covered by outside sources including Middle East sovereign wealth funds. eBay dismissed the whole thing as "neither credible nor attractive" within a week of receiving it. Cohen then escalated by buying up a 9.8% stake in eBay by mid-July, declaring "we're coming for eBay one way or another." He also scrapped a $35 billion personal pay package tied to the deal going through.

GameStop's market cap currently sits around $8.6–12 billion depending on the source, against eBay's valuation of roughly $54 billion — which always made the math on a full acquisition look somewhere between heroic and delusional. Cohen built his reputation turning Chewy into a pet food giant before its $3.35 billion sale to PetSmart in 2017, then rode the memestock wave into GameStop's CEO chair. Since then he's closed hundreds of stores, wound down GameStop's NFT marketplace, and shifted the chain heavily toward collectibles and trading cards. The eBay bid was framed as the next logical step — transforming a struggling retail chain into a platform that could "legitimately compete with Amazon" — but the financing never materialized in any convincing form.

GameStop has declined to comment on its future plans, and Bloomberg's sources describe the partnership as just one of several options still on the table. Whether Cohen actually withdraws the bid or keeps using the stake as leverage remains to be seen — but for now, the $56 billion takeover that nobody asked for appears to be quietly deflating.