The 'Meme King' is turning eBay listings into takeover theater

• GameStop CEO Ryan Cohen was deemed the 'Meme King' during the company's 2021 stock rally.
• The CEO is now on a public pressure campaign to take over eBay, the online marketplace.
• Cohen posted eBay listings of video games and memorabilia and said it was an attempt to raise money.

In a world where cultural capital equals deal currency, GameStop CEO Ryan Cohen is dipping into his reserves.

On Wednesday, Cohen put up some of his video games, sports memorabilia, and GameStop merch on eBay as part of his very public pressure campaign to buy the online marketplace, which is worth four times the value of the video game store.

"I'm selling stuff on eBay to pay for eBay," the so-called "Meme King" said on X.

The listings include a GameStop mug, a Halo Master Chief statue, and a graded Donald Trump card showing the president being sworn in after the 2016 election.

The point is obviously not the stuff. Whatever Cohen raises from the eBay listings will be immaterial to the financing of his $56 billion bid. At the time of publication, the mug was bidding at over $3,000, and the Master Chief statue was over $10,000.

Attention is being treated as the capital here.

"He's not trying to do this to finance the acquisition," Jill Fisch, corporate law professor at the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School, told Business Insider. "He's trying to do this to generate coverage, to generate publicity, and also just to sort of highlight eBay as a platform."

Back in 2021, when GameStop went on a stock tear amid a retail trading frenzy, Cohen became the unlikely face and folk hero of the meme stock movement.

The Montreal-born entrepreneur had all the makings of an outsider that retail traders loved. His previous venture before GameStop was cofounding Chewy, an online pet supplies store, which he later sold to PetSmart for about $3.4 billion. Cohen is also a college dropout and has no ties to the Wall Street establishment typically seen in the C-suite pipeline.

In November of 2020, Cohen submitted his activist letter to GameStop, urging the company to become a "technology-driven business," and joined the board in 2021. He was elected president and CEO two years later.

Spokespeople for GameStop and eBay did not respond to a request for comment.

By some measures, Cohen has turned around the video game retailer, cutting costs and restoring profitability through financial repositioning rather than an overhaul of GameStop's core business.

Chronically online retail traders were soon hooked on Cohen, and he took on an Elon Musk-esque following. They began parsing his cryptic social media posts for any insight into what the Meme King would do next.

In one case, Cohen's mysterious tweet of an ice-cream cone and frog emoji was shortly followed by an 85% jump in GameStop stock.

Fisch said Cohen's appeal to retail investors seems to be swaying some trading, and social media plays a critical role here.

"I think the whole meme-stock frenzy is only just starting to tell Wall Street and Main Street participants in the market how effective social media can be in getting somebody's story out," she said.

Cohen's public antics are not without risk, mainly because eBay may not consider the CEO's proposal a serious offer. EBay has so far only said that it's reviewing the unsolicited proposal.

"Honestly, I think this is all very hard to parse," Ann Lipton, corporate governance and business law professor at Colorado University, told Business Insider. "It feels like he wants to lean in to Gamestop's memestock status — either to simply boost Gamestop's stock, or maybe even to boost it enough to actually finance a takeover. He's learned an army of retail traders can have large economic effects."

Whether that army will play in favor of Cohen's latest bid is hard to say.

GameStop is trading around $25.17, down about 10% from its recent high of $27.94, following reports of its eBay proposal. The company remains far below its 2021 meme-stock peak, when it traded at about $121 on a split-adjusted basis.

Some of Cohen's biggest supporters have started to doubt the CEO. "Big Short" investor Michael Burry, who initially praised Cohen as the next Warren Buffet, said on Tuesday that he sold his entire GameStop position.

Cohen's move did unleash a flurry of good memes. At the very least, he'll sell a very expensive, old mug.