Rob Armstrong

Yeah, that's true.

I think this is a bad idea.

What do you think about leveraging these combined businesses up?

Are these good businesses for carrying leverage and presumably eventually paying it down?

Which is what got it into this problem in the first place.

If they'd been sensible and took on a little debt, someone never would have showed up.

Take on some debt and either pay a special dividend or buy back some shares.

You and I have both...

listen to many promises in our career as financial journalists about cost-cutting campaigns.

And especially after mergers, they do disappoint probably a bit more than they appear in my experience.

But that all reappears as debt.

In a more rational world, wouldn't it go like this?

eBay looks at this offer and says, hmm, this is a good idea.

Here's what we're going to do.

We're going to buy GameStop using our shares as currency and our balance sheet as a more solid balance sheet on which to borrow.

And that might save a lot of trouble.

Yeah.

Let us pause for a moment on this outstanding metaphor, John.

So those of us who were playing video games in the early 1980s will remember the crucial moment in the game Pac-Man

in which you're this creature who goes around a maze trying to eat dots, chased by ghosts.