Kim Kahn

In other news of note, Denny's shareholders approved the restaurant's $620 million buyout by private equity firm Triartisan Capital Advisors, that's the owner of TGI Fridays and P.F.

Chang's, along with Treville Capital and Yadav Enterprises, one of Denny's largest franchisees.

Denny's opened in 1953 as a coffee shop before shifting to a 24-hour diner model and leaning on franchising as it expanded through the 60s and 70s.

It spent a year inside larger corporate structures before finally trading under its own name on the NASDAQ in 1997.

In the 2000s and 2010s, management pushed an asset-light strategy, re-franchising locations and pitching the stock as a cash-generative, franchisor-heavy diner brand.

But shares lost more than 75% from their 2019 pre-pandemic high as traffic struggled, ultimately prompting the board to explore strategic alternatives and accept the current buyout.

And in the Wall Street Research Corner, Wells Fargo issued a stark warning for cable operators, slapping sell ratings across the board.

Analysts cut Charter Communications, Comcast, Altus' Optimum, and Cable One to underweight, and now expect the group to lose about 1 million residential broadband subscribers this year as fixed wireless and fiber scoop up essentially 100% of net broadband ads.

Welcome to Seeking Alpha's Wall Street Lunch, our afternoon update on today's market action, news, and analysis.

Good afternoon.

Today is Wednesday, January 7th, and I'm your host, Kim Kahn.

Our top story so far, GameStop's CEO is making a moonshot bet on a return to meme-era valuations.

GameStop announced that its board approved a long-term performance-based stock option award for chief executive Ryan Cohen with no guaranteed compensation.

The package only pays out if the company hits a series of aggressive market value and profit targets.

The award covers options on 171.5 million GameStop shares at an exercise price of $20.66, split into nine tranches tied to market cap and cumulative performance EBITDA.

The stock trades around $21.75 today.

And the milestones?

They start at a $20 billion market cap and $2 billion in cumulative EBITDA and scale up in 10% increments.

Full vesting requires GameStop to reach $100 billion market cap and $10 billion in cumulative EBITDA, numbers that would eclipse even the peak of the mean stock frenzy.

For context, GameStop's current market value is $9.3 billion.