[aurareturn]

Besides the Larry Ellison, Trump, and Middle East backing, Paramount and WB's businesses have synergy.

Gamestop and eBay have no synergy. Gamestop can't possibly run eBay better than eBay's current management. It's a meme stock looking to make noise so they can get a higher stock price, and then unload their shares onto the public market to raise cash.

GME has 3x'ed their shares outstanding since Covid.

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/GME/gamestop/share...

[coke12]

They have deep synergies in the collectibles market. There's a Venn diagram with eBay on one side and Gamestop on the other, and cultural characters like Logan Paul with his $16m Pokemon card right in the intersection.

This is a big market getting bigger. Americans have more spending money than ever before, especially at the top end, and the collectibles market is expected to grow as much as 7% y/y for a long time. That's like $50b of new spend every year. Massive opportunity.

I think this is smart. Gamestop is a vibes company, everyone knows it, and this is an opportunity to acquire a real business with strong tailwinds. Everyone knows eBay has been poorly run for 20 years. Even in 2010/2011 when I worked there it was running on empty so to speak. Some opportunity to take control of that narrative and grow the business in demographics with deep pockets would be huge.

[aurareturn]

They have no synergy. One is a meme stock that sells video games in retail stores. The other is an auction site eCommerce platform.

Collectibles is tiny market for eBay. They sell mostly mass produced goods and random used things.

[RajT88]

Went into one today. They sell about as much collectible crap as they do videogames these days.

[esseph]

> Americans have more spending money than ever before

WHAT?

> especially at the top end

Ahh, that's the correct identifier.

It's an extremely K-shaped economy.

[qingcharles]

If they promised to revert eBay's search to how it worked in 1997 I'd throw them a few dollars to bolster their "takeover."

[tim-tday]

Hell, if they promised to do literally anything differently I’d support they. Worst case it’d be entertaining. Best case, both companies will be utterly destroyed.

[hakfoo]

I could see a synergy. Remember when there was a small trend of strip-mall "We'll sell on eBay for you" shops?

That seemed like a great idea for certain types of goods-- the market for plenty of collectibles are thin in any given locality, but it was always clumsy to get to the global marketplace. If you had a normal consumer eBay account with 30 feedback, you might have a hard time getting trust against sellers with 400,000. You had to deal with packing, shipping, nonpayment, complaints.

Handing it all off to a professional with experience and a high volume credible account was worth a consignment commission. But they seemed to dry up after a while, I think when eBay pivoted from "the world's garage sale" to "AliExpress but some products are in domestic warehouses."

If you had a widely deployed retail presence that was already used to dealing with used merchandise (pawnshop-style laws, routing items for cleaning/refubrishment etc), turning the tradein counter into a consignment counter is a potential win. New revenue stream, gets people in the door, and provides an expectation of legitimacy and predictability.

[mattmaroon]

Yeah I don’t blame them. They didn’t create the meme but once it happened, any responsible leader would start doing secondary offerings to raise money. I sure would. If morons want to keep investing in the stock of a company that has no other chance of survival, great. Now they’ve got $9 billion on hand and they’ve had time to find a niche, right-size, and the interest on the cash pile is great too.

[kotaKat]

> Gamestop can't possibly run eBay better than eBay's current management.

I meaaaaaaan...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EBay_stalking_scandal

"Deferred Prosecution Agreement with District of Massachusetts" still sits in the eBay footer. ;)

[applfanboysbgon]

What in the actual fuck? I can't believe I never heard about this before, this is batshit insane.

[throwaway5752]

The synergy is "corruption"