GameStop Might Walk Away From Its $56 Billion Offer to Buy eBay
GameStop CEO Ryan Cohen is thinking about pulling the company's $56 billion offer to buy eBay, according to a report published August 10, 2026 by Bloomberg. Reuters confirmed the story the same day.
Instead of buying eBay outright, Cohen may pursue a partnership or joint venture — a business arrangement where two companies work together without one owning the other.
The original offer was laid out roughly three months earlier. In a letter released online on May 4, 2026, Cohen said GameStop wanted to buy all of eBay's stock at $125 per share. Half of the payment would be in cash, and the other half would be paid in GameStop stock. The letter did not give full details on how the stock portion would work, according to the verified reporting.
At $125 per share, the offer price was higher than what eBay's stock was trading for at the time. That gap — paying above the market price to convince shareholders to sell — is called a premium. The exact size of the premium is not specified, because the verified facts do not include eBay's share price on May 4.
The idea behind a potential partnership, as reported by Bloomberg journalists Bailey Lipschultz and Spencer Soper, is that eBay would use GameStop's roughly 1,600 US stores. Those stores could serve as pickup and shipping hubs for eBay's online marketplace. How exactly the partnership would work has not been disclosed.
A deal of this size — $56 billion — would rank among the largest proposed buyouts of a physical-store retailer in recent years.
Here is where it gets complicated. Buying eBay for $56 billion would require GameStop to raise a lot of money for the cash portion of the deal. Whether GameStop has enough financial firepower on its balance sheet — a company's financial statement showing what it owns and owes — has been a question since the offer was first made public. A partnership would avoid that problem entirely, since neither company would be buying the other.
The distinction matters. A full buyout at $125 per share would lock GameStop into paying eBay's shareholders a fixed price. A partnership does not do that. It lets Cohen test whether eBay can benefit from GameStop's stores without spending billions on an acquisition. What is not clear is whether eBay's management would accept a partnership instead of the higher payout they would get from the original offer. The verified reporting does not address that question.
For anyone following this story, the main things to watch are whether Cohen officially withdraws the $56 billion offer, what a partnership would look like, and how eBay's board and shareholders react to getting less than what was first proposed. The Bloomberg report, confirmed by Reuters, says the withdrawal is being considered but had not happened as of August 10, 2026.
