GameStop’s CEO will Layoff 30% of EBay Staff…..

Added: 2026-05-11

[00:00:00]Mic check one, two. It's the Y2K collector.

[00:00:04]And I was partially wrong in my assessment of the GameStop CEO Ryan Cohen when I discussed his interview with CNBC. And I guess the thing that I didn't realize when watching that interview was that his demeanor in that interview is just who he is.

[00:00:27]And I had never really known about him.

[00:00:30]Um I had never really looked into him cuz I never really had a reason to. But essentially what he plans on doing with eBay uh using GameStop is not original. And I'll explain what I mean.

[00:00:46]Now, if I'm wrong, I really encourage someone who's a lot more financially astute to pretty much let me know if I'm wrong.

[00:00:56]But at a high level, I mean, not even bird's-eye level, but at a satellite level, in a nutshell the CEO of GameStop is basically proposing that he's going to buy eBay using cash and stock.

[00:01:16]And the cash or I'm not sure how much of the cash or the stock portion this is going to come from.

[00:01:23]But essentially, he's going to pay for eBay using future revenues that they will earn once he acquires the company and fires half the staff.

[00:01:35]Because that's that's that's roughly what I'm pretty sure he is going to do if he gets his hands on eBay.

[00:01:43]And that has been the common trend for a CEOs um for the last couple years.

[00:01:51]Um and it's really picked up in the last 12 months.

[00:01:55]Uh I think Elon Musk was probably one of the first really well-known CEOs who decided to purchase Twitter, rename it, and pretty much fire the bulk of the staff. And what Elon Musk showed a lot of CEOs is, "Hey, you can still grow a company without having as much blow and without having as much uh, staff."

[00:02:22]And so, we've seen massive layoffs, massive. We've seen companies from Dell to Meta to Amazon to Google to Block to all sorts of companies have pretty much laid a lot of their staff off, um, basically saying how AI has helped them to drive efficiency, and they've been able to remove waste.

[00:02:50]Well, when I've listened to Ryan Cohen talk about eBay, and I've listened to him in multiple in multiple interviews, not just the one with CNBC, but one of the things that he addresses with eBay is the large amount of inefficiencies that they have, the massive amounts of money that they're spending on marketing, and how much blow and waste there is, and how there are a lot of people pretty much looking to protect their jobs.

[00:03:29]And if you're an employee of eBay, and you work in their marketing department, if you work in their advertising department, I would really be looking for a new job.

[00:03:41]I really would start looking for a new job and try to figure out a new place to go.

[00:03:47]Because if this guy is able to get this deal done, if Ryan Cohen gets his hands on eBay, you better bet your bottom dollar that the first place layoffs are going to occur at eBay are going to be in the marketing and advertising departments immediately.

[00:04:05]And what he is going to do once he eliminates however many billion that they're spending on marketing advertising, he is going to turn around and take those savings and turn turn back around to Wall Street and say, "Hey, look Wall Street.

[00:04:22]I have made eBay this much more profitable by making massive cuts in these two departments." And it probably won't just be in like the marketing and advertising department. I'm sure he'll find inefficiencies.

[00:04:36]And just for those of you who don't know, whenever you hear a CEO say the word inefficiencies, it means layoffs are coming. It means people are about to get fired. Because an inefficiency means that you don't help the company make money. So, why should they pay you?

[00:04:51]And I don't know the eBay business structure. I haven't really studied eBay. I don't know what their you know, how well their company's been doing.

[00:05:00]Um but if it is true that they've been spending billions on marketing and advertising and they have not grown their user base, then Ryan Cohen does have a point. I mean, he's right. If the math doesn't math or if it doesn't make sense to spend that much money, well, then yeah, there probably is bloat.

[00:05:20]And I do agree that in most companies, not just eBay, I'm sure there are levels of efficiency. I mean, I'm sure any person watching this video right now, you can think of one person that you've worked with where you've said to yourself, "How does this person have this job?"

[00:05:39]Because they just don't add value to your job. Either they don't add value to your team.

[00:05:45]They're not a team player. They show up late. Their work is shotty. It's never up to par. Um you know, they're they're always dropping the ball or waiting for someone else to come in and do the heavy lifting and then they try to take the credit. There's a lot of inefficiency in a lot of companies.

[00:06:03]But my only issue with the whole GameStop and buying eBay thing is I can see the path to driving efficiency by laying people off because that's easy to do. And any CEO can come into a company lay off half the staff and then turn around to Wall Street and say, "Hey, listen, look.

[00:06:25]We're we're twice as profitable because we laid off half the staff." That's an easy thing to do.

[00:06:31]When he starts to talk about how uh you know, GameStop can create uh a physical uh you know, add a physical dimension to what is a digital business in eBay. When you start to hear Ryan Cohen talk about how GameStop sites could become authentication hubs for people selling you know, high valuable collectibles and high valuable graded cards, this is where I begin to scratch my head.

[00:07:01]Because GameStop isn't even good at doing that with their with the stuff they're selling now.

[00:07:07]GameStop still has a very difficult time authenticating retro video games. They still can't spot a fake Pokémon in their own stores.

[00:07:18]So if if GameStop can't spot spot fake Pokémon games, if GameStop cannot spot re-labeled video games or or fake video games or or broken video games, if they don't have the infrastructure in place to do this for video games, how the hell are they going to be able to authenticate anything else?

[00:07:40]Why would I trust a physical GameStop store to have the ability to authenticate anything more valuable than retro video games?

[00:07:51]That's my only issue with what Ryan Cohen is saying when he talks about you know, how you know, what eBay does can be bolstered by what GameStop is already doing. Because just because GameStop deals in collectibles with Pokémon cards and things like that, it doesn't necessarily mean that they do it well.

[00:08:11]And as someone who shops there, I mean, I just picked up this copy of Doom from there, right? Um, but I shop at GameStop for retro games because I personally know how to detect fake video games. I personally I'm not saying I'm an expert, but I'm pretty good at spotting the fake stuff. If I wasn't, I don't know if I'd shop there.

[00:08:31]So, in a nutshell, I see on one end what he's talking about, and I see how he can drive uh profits in eBay through layoffs, but I don't really see how what he's doing at GameStop is going to make eBay operations more efficient. But if someone else knows, you guys let me know down in the comments.

[00:08:56]It's still about 2K Collector. Take it easy.