John Foley

I can see myself on both sides.

But if I'm on the eBay side, I say, well, you're going to pay for this bid by taking out debt, which is actually secured against our business.

You're leveraging our balance sheet to pay us a dividend.

We can do that ourselves.

And they can.

So eBay's defense would likely be to take on some debt.

Exactly.

And maybe not five times net debt to EBITDA, which is a lot of debt.

So the question for GameStop would be, can you bring down that debt very quickly?

And of course, because the guy who runs this company has boundless self-belief, he thinks that he can cut costs, grow the company, pay down the debt in no time.

I can think of examples of companies that have cut costs very effectively, especially in industries like consumer goods.

It's actually not that hard to cut costs, and often you end up with

cutting more costs than you thought you would.

Banks also, that's the case.

But in this situation, but obviously that doesn't always happen and you can still get a company that ends up being worth less because it's just harder to run.

Yes.

But I think in this case, there isn't obviously much overlap.

This is this guy, Ryan Cohen, saying, I'd be better at running this business than...

I will cut costs because they're just not very good at managing the business efficiently, which is why the other way to think about this is that this is an attempt by Ryan Cohen to insert himself as the CEO of eBay through a sort of convoluted version of a takeover.

So eBay shareholders are basically going to be asking themselves, do we want a different CEO and do we want that CEO to be this guy who runs GameStop?