Emmet

GameStop and eBay, it's not like a perfect fit.

It's like if you heard Home Depot was acquiring Williams Sonoma, is that the name of the business, the paint company?

Sherwin-Williams.

Thank you.

Okay, I can see how that might work.

It's not a perfect fit, but they're tangential businesses.

But you're like GameStop and eBay.

I personally don't see that.

But the author of

The piece that I read in Fortune argued that in reality, eBay would effectively end up owning GameStop rather than the other way around.

And while Cohen is pitching the vision of creating a serious competitor to Amazon, and the audience laughs,

using GameStop stores as fulfillment centers and bringing a more entrepreneurial culture to eBay.

And I personally think the audience would laugh even louder.

The piece is really skeptical of those claims.

And the broader warning is really about financial engineering and market psychology, because that's what we're looking at here.

100 to your question who'd take on that debt well there is a narrative that has to be spun that is rooted in psychology and ends up on the desk of somebody with a pen that can issue tens a metaphorical pen tens of billions of cash in in a lot in the form of a loan and you know when highly valued companies uh realize their own future growth they

doesn't justify its current share price, there's often a temptation to use that expensive stock to buy durable cash flows elsewhere, which I get.

I mean, that bit makes sense.

it's not surprising really because he needs to do something yeah ebay ebay is maybe slightly ambitious target i maybe would have gone for something smaller that might have been a slightly more manageable than something five times the size of your own company but yeah i mean it's i think the aol time warner thing is a cautionary tale and um that merger at the time was really celebrated as visionary but it ended up destroying you know extraordinary amounts of shareholder value

Daddy.