Once upon a time, companies made things — furniture, shoes, violins. Then came companies that bought other companies. And then came the rare hybrids that did both. The most famous of these is Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway, a $475bn conglomerate that owns everything from the insurer Geico to the chocolatier See's Candies, and which held its much-anticipated annual meeting over the weekend.
Few leaders have managed to excel in this middle ground between operating businesses and acquiring them. Usually the role attracts a particular type: the self-confident billionaire. Bill Ackman is using a blank-cheque vehicle to chase Universal Music Group at a reported €55bn valuation. Brad Jacobs runs QXO, a roll-up company that has executed roughly $30bn in building-products deals in the past year. Now there is GameStop. On Sunday, the pandemic-era meme-stock champion launched a takeover bid for the online auctioneer eBay worth $56bn in cash and stock.
Here's where the story gets strange. GameStop, run by former petcare retail tycoon Ryan Cohen, has a market capitalisation of just $12bn — roughly $5bn of which is simply the cash sitting on its balance sheet. In other words, Cohen runs a pile of cash more than a company. The differences with Buffett are stark. Half the eBay bid would be paid in GameStop shares, which the column politely calls 'highly volatile.' GameStop has raised cash by issuing convertible bonds, a financing tool favoured by issuers whose stock prices swing wildly. Buffett, by contrast, almost always pays cash — easier to value — and rarely brags about how much better he could run a target than the incumbent CEO.
The auctioneer has ways to push back if it wants to. Beyond the bumpy nature of GameStop's share-based offering, much of the bid would in effect leverage up eBay's balance sheet, something eBay could do on its own. Its net debt was just 0.6 times EBITDA at the end of March. Cohen wants to convert eBay's 1,600 store-equivalent footprint... wait, the other way: he wants to push GameStop's roughly 1,600 physical locations into eBay outlets. And if shareholders want more stores, they can vote for that without selling.
The real pitch, then, is Cohen himself. He is presented as a visionary who can outmanage eBay's current CEO Jamie Iannone. Some clearly believe him: Canada's TD Bank has lined up a $20bn debt commitment, and GameStop has proposed awarding Cohen a bonus worth over $20bn if he hits certain targets — though shareholders haven't yet signed off.
Buffett, for all his quirks, has seldom indulged in braggadocio, and rarely demanded huge stock-option packages tied to future market-cap goals. Given the deliberately unshowy nature of this year's Berkshire shareholder meeting, his successors Greg Abel and Ajit Jain look set to be similarly modest. There's another distinction worth bearing in mind
A $12bn meme stock just bid $56bn for a company four times its size — and the man behind it wants you to believe he's the next Warren Buffett.
On Sunday, GameStop launched a takeover bid for online auctioneer eBay worth $56bn in cash and stock. The catch: GameStop itself is only worth about $12bn, and roughly $5bn of that is just the cash sitting on its balance sheet. CEO Ryan Cohen — the former Chewy founder who became a meme-stock folk hero in 2021 — is running a company that today holds more cash than actual business.
The Lex column frames the move against Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway, the $475bn conglomerate that just held its annual meeting and is sitting on $380bn in cash and Treasuries. Cohen is openly chasing the Buffett 'capital allocator' archetype. Whether he's the next Buffett or the anti-Buffett is the whole question.
This isn't really a retail story — it's a story about what kind of currency a company's stock actually is. Two useful parallels:
If you've ever watched a stock pump on TikTok or Reddit, this is the grown-up version of that energy — meme valuations being deployed as actual M&A weapons. For anyone thinking about finance, business, or even just how markets interact with internet culture, this deal is a live experiment. It also shapes how a generation of CEOs will think about using their share price as a tool: is it a measuring stick, or is it ammo?
Buffett spent 60 years proving that patience plus cash plus boring discipline compounds into staggering wealth. Cohen is testing whether you can shortcut that with charisma, a loyal retail-investor base, and a willingness to swing big. Watch three things next: whether eBay's board engages or rejects, whether GameStop's stock holds up under deal scrutiny, and whether Berkshire's new CEO Greg Abel does the un-Buffett thing and finally spends some of that $380bn pile.