GameStop is trying to buy eBay for £40 billion to rival Amazon

US retailer GameStop has made an unsolicited offer to buy eBay for over £40 billion, as it attempts to become a rival to Amazon.

While the UK has gaming retailers like GAME and CeX on the high street, the main equivalent in the US is GameStop.

The US retailer does have some international presence, with stores in France and Australia, but according to reports, the chain has closed many stores across Europe, Australia, and Canada in recent years, as the market for box video games dwindles.

However, despite seemingly being in a downward spiral, the GameStop short squeeze of 2021, as dramatised in the movie Dumb Money, has allowed the company to survive and it has now made a$55.5 billion (£40.9 billion) unsolicited offer to buy eBay… with money it doesn’t have.

As shared in a statement on Sunday, GameStop’s chief executive Ryan Cohen has made an offer for $125 (£92) per share in cash and stock, $20 more than the shares were valued at when New York trading ended on Friday.

As part of the proposed offer, Cohen plans to make $2 billion (£1.47 billion) of cost saving measures at the company within a year of the deal being completed, mostly within its sales and marketing division. In other words, there’ll be a lot of job cuts.

If eBay rejects the deal, Cohen said he is prepared to take the bid directly to shareholders of the business, aka a hostile takeover. GameStop currently has around a 5% stake in eBay.

Speaking to The Wall Street Journal, Cohen believes eBay should be worth ‘a lot more money’ and ‘could be a legit competitor to Amazon’. He believes GameStop’s network of around 1,600 stores in the US could be used to collect and authenticate items from eBay sellers, and claims the company isn’t doing enough in the realm of live commerce (where brands sell products via livestreams).

It’s an ambitious, some might say ludicrous, offer as GameStop is a much smaller company than eBay. The latter is valued at around $46 billion, whereas GameStop’s worth is around $12 billion. Smaller companies have pulled off big acquisitions like this before, as seen with Paramount’s acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery, but they have to get their money from somewhere and in this case it’s not from selling copies of Call Of Duty.

GameStop states it has around $9 billion in cash on its balance sheet to put towards it, along with a commitment letter from investment bank TD Securities to provide around $20 billion in debt financing. It’s claimed Cohen could also seek outside investors to help make up the rest.

If the deal goes through, Cohen states he will serve as chief executive officer of both GameStop and eBay, adding: ‘I will receive no salary, no cash bonuses, and no golden parachute – I will be compensated solely based on the performance of the combined company.’

It’s a good deal for eBay’s shareholders, but the big question is whether they’ll want to disrupt things with new leadership. In its first quarter results of 2026, eBay revenue was up 19%, so it isn’t exactly struggling.

As always happens in these situations, where venture capitalists force a takeover of an otherwise healthy company, it’ll immediately saddle it with billions in debt, and in many cases this leads to the company going under a relatively short time later.

Worryingly, the same thing is also happening with EA, which will go from one of the biggest publishers in the world, and enjoying healthy profits, to having an instant debt of $20 billion, once it completes its Saudi funded buyout.

However, with so much money on the table, it’s unlikely shareholders will be thinking much about how it affects the company’s future or its workers. GameCentral has reached out to eBay for comment.

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