Ryan Cohen has spent much of his career being underestimated. The 40-year-old Canadian-born CEO of GameStop has built a cult-like following among retail investors by repeatedly winning bets that Wall Street dismissed as absurd — first with online pet supplies, then with a dying mall video-game chain, and now with a $56 billion attempt to buy eBay, an e-commerce platform roughly four times the size of his own company.
The immediate response from professional analysts has ranged from skepticism to outright mockery. GameStop is valued at roughly $11 billion; eBay is worth around $47 billion. How, critics ask, could the smaller company realistically finance such a takeover? Cohen has not been deterred. In an awkward but instantly viral CNBC interview, the leather-jacket-clad billionaire described the bid's structure in clipped monosyllables — 'half cash, half stock' — and told the Financial Times that the more eBay fights him, the more determined he becomes. The interview generated a wave of memes online; supporters argued the spectacle only reinforced the mythology of Cohen as an eccentric outsider underestimated by establishment finance.
This script has played out before. Born in Montreal in 1986 to a teacher mother and a glassware-importer father, Cohen never attended university. As a teenager, he taught himself coding and built websites for family and small businesses. In 2011, he co-founded Chewy, an online pet-supplies retailer, after dozens of venture capitalists turned him down — most pointing to the cautionary tale of Pets.com, the dot-com-era flameout. Cohen ignored them. He focused obsessively on customer service, encouraging employees to write handwritten cards to grieving owners whose animals had died. By 2017, private-equity-backed PetSmart bought Chewy for $3.35 billion, then the largest e-commerce deal on record.
Flush with cash and credibility, Cohen launched RC Ventures, his investment vehicle. That led to his most controversial bet: in 2020, while much of Wall Street viewed GameStop as a doomed relic of physical retail, Cohen quietly built a large stake and pushed for a radical digital transformation. His arrival electrified the retail traders gathering on Reddit forums like WallStreetBets during the pandemic lockdowns. Many viewed Cohen as an anti-establishment figure willing to challenge the short sellers betting against the company. What followed became one of the defining financial manias of the Covid era: GameStop shares exploded in early 2021 in a coordinated buying campaign that triggered a historic short squeeze, vaporizing billions of dollars for hedge funds and turning the stock into the ultimate meme-stock symbol. Online followers dubbed Cohen the 'Meme King.'
Now he is attempting his boldest gamble yet. If successful, the eBay deal would rank among the most audacious takeovers in recent history — and the first truly powered by a meme-stock army rather than traditional Wall Street financing. Cohen has argued that GameStop's retail-investor footprint complements eBay's marketplace and has pledged deep cost cuts to make the math work. Analysts remain unconvinced, but Cohen's history suggests dismissing him outright carries its own risks. As he told the FT, his disdain for corporate America is well-documented; eBay, he said, is simply a good example of that. Whether the bid succeeds or collapses, it represents a real-world test of whether online tribes can now move billion-dollar deals.
An $11 billion video-game retailer just bid $56 billion for an e-commerce giant four times its size. Wall Street laughed. Reddit cheered. Welcome to the first true meme-stock-driven takeover attempt.
Ryan Cohen, the 40-year-old chairman and CEO of GameStop, has launched an unsolicited $56 billion bid to buy eBay — a company roughly four times the size of his own. The proposal is structured as 'half cash, half stock' at $125 per share, a 46% premium over eBay's price before GameStop quietly began accumulating a 5% stake in February.
Analysts immediately questioned how GameStop, valued at around $11 billion, could realistically finance the takeover of a company worth about $47 billion. Cohen first laid out the bid in a now-viral CNBC interview where he wore a leather jacket, gave clipped one-syllable answers, and told the FT: 'The more [eBay] fights me, the more… I'm not going to take no for an answer.'
This isn't a normal corporate takeover — it's a fusion of activist investing, internet culture, and reflexive finance, where belief itself becomes the fuel.
If you've ever bought a stock on Robinhood, watched a TikTok stock-tip, or argued about GameStop in 2021, this is the sequel. The deal tests whether the retail-investor army that broke hedge funds five years ago can now actually move corporate America. For anyone considering business school, finance, or just thinking about where economic power lives in 2026, the answer to 'does meme energy translate into real M&A?' will reshape how the next decade of dealmaking works.
Hostile takeovers are an old genre — think Carl Icahn in the 1980s — but financed traditionally by Wall Street muscle, not online tribes. If Cohen pulls this off, expect a wave of imitators trying to weaponize loyal retail bases against bigger, sleepier incumbents. If it collapses, watch GameStop's stock and Cohen's mythology together: the second-order effect could be a serious test of whether 'meme premium' valuations can survive their first true real-world stress test.