Updated August 24, 2026 · 15 min read · by Eric Lindquist
In May, GameStop bid about $56 billion for a company worth almost six times what it is. eBay's board wrote back that the offer was "neither credible nor attractive." Most people filed that under things that were never going to happen and moved on.
Ryan Cohen did not move on. Over the following ten weeks GameStop spent roughly $4.35 billion of its own cash buying eBay stock outright, and by mid-July it held 9.8% of the company with the votes to go with it. He told the Financial Times, in an interview GameStop then filed with the SEC, "All I do is work. I want to own eBay — that's all I've been thinking about."
Kalshi, the CFTC-regulated exchange where a contract pays out $1 if the thing happens and nothing if it does not, runs a market on whether GameStop announces a signed deal for eBay before January 1, 2027. A yes costs about a dime. In moneyline terms that is roughly a +900 shot.
We handed eight AI models the entire filed record and asked each one to put its own number on it, then let them read each other's reasoning and revise. Every one of them came back under the market, and none of them got there by deciding Cohen is bluffing. One of them named the reason outright, and it is a date sitting in eBay's own proxy statement.
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What Cohen Actually Bought, To The Dollar
GameStop's original eBay position was mostly paper. It owned a small block of stock outright and had economic exposure to another 39,046,658 shares parked inside put and call option pairs with a bank. Those contracts gave GameStop the profit and loss of a big shareholder and none of the votes, because the shares stayed with the bank until GameStop chose to take delivery.
Then it took delivery. GameStop's Schedule 13D/A Amendment No. 4, filed July 17, lays out the receipts. Between June 8 and June 15 it bought 3,516,077 eBay shares on the open market for $381,301,906.81. On July 15 it told eBay it was settling all 39,046,658 option-pair shares for real stock, and that settlement closed on July 17 at a total cost of $3,965,077,113.19. The average strike worked out to $101.295333 a share. The filing says the money came from working capital, and that nothing was borrowed to do it.
Add the two together and GameStop spent $4,346,379,020 building a 9.8% voting position. The cover page of that filing reports 43,390,383 shares, 9.8% of eBay, with sole voting power over every single one.
That is not a stunt. GameStop's entire market value is about $8.1 billion at $18.04 a share. It just put more than half of that number into another company's stock.
The Letter eBay Sent Back
On May 12, eBay's board rejected the proposal outright. The language was "neither credible nor attractive," and the board criticized the financing, the debt load of the combined company, and Cohen's own economic incentives. Chairman Paul S. Pressler signed it.
That last item was the sharpest one. GameStop had a CEO performance award sitting on its own proxy that the Financial Times reported could have paid Cohen as much as $35 billion. On June 23 the company pulled the proposal, saying it did so "at the request of Mr. Cohen." On Bloomberg Tech in July, in a transcript GameStop also filed with the SEC, Ed Ludlow put the leverage question to him directly, citing Moody's warning that the deal would be credit negative for the combined company. Cohen's answer was blunt: "We have a highly confident letter from our bankers. We have a lot of parties that are interested in this transaction. And the most important thing. Ultimately, if we can't get the debt, then it means that eBay can't get the debt and eBay can get the debt."
He also told Ludlow he is putting $500 million of his own money into the transaction and has committed to pulling $2 billion of costs out of eBay in year one. Asked to say what that new share authorization would actually let him do, his answer ran five words: "Buy the business. Buy eBay."
The public record on this fight is unusually loud in both directions, and every word above comes from a filing either company made with the SEC.
Half Cash, Half Stock, And A Whole Lot Of New Shares
The offer, as GameStop described it in an 8-K the day after sending it, is a non-binding proposal to buy the rest of eBay at $125.00 a share in cash and stock. Cohen's own shorthand for the split, on CNBC, was half and half. The Financial Times reported that Cohen's description of the deal on CNBC as "half cash, half stock" promptly became an internet meme. The math is the reason.
eBay has about 445 million shares out. At $125 each, that values the whole company near $55.6 billion, which is the $56 billion figure the Financial Times and Bloomberg both used.
GameStop does not have to buy all of it, because it already owns 9.8%. Net that out and the shares it still has to pay for come to roughly 401.6 million, or about $50.2 billion. Split evenly, that is $25.1 billion of stock and $25.1 billion of cash.
Take the stock half first. GameStop trades at $18.04, so paying $25.1 billion in its own shares means printing something near 1.39 billion new ones. It currently has 448,691,257 outstanding. The stock half of this offer, by itself, is about three times GameStop's entire existing share count.
The cash half is the other problem. GameStop's most recent balance sheet, from its first-quarter results as of May 2, shows $7.4 billion of cash and equivalents plus $970.5 million of marketable securities. Add the digital assets and the collateral it has pledged against a derivative and the company puts the whole pile at $9.7 billion. Roughly $4.35 billion of that has since gone into eBay shares. Against a $25.1 billion cash requirement, everything left over has to come from lenders, and what GameStop has said publicly it has from them is a highly confident letter. That is exactly what it sounds like: a letter saying the bank feels good about its chances of raising the money. It is not a commitment to lend, and no commitment has been filed.
GameStop has been busy tidying up regardless. On August 2 it agreed to swap about $400 million of its 2030 convertible notes and $1.0 billion of its 2032 notes for common stock, cutting long-term debt by roughly $1.4 billion without spending a dollar of cash. The exchange is expected to close on or about September 23. It is a real improvement and it barely dents the $25.1 billion.
None of this makes the bid impossible. It makes it expensive, slow, and dependent on other people saying yes.
The Date In eBay's Own Proxy Statement
Here is the part that decides this contract, and it has nothing to do with money.
Cohen has been open that if eBay's board will not engage, he goes to eBay's shareholders. He said so to the Financial Times: "The optimist in me tells me they should do the right thing and engage with us but the pessimist in me tells them they're going to wait till the annual meeting. There's a lot of steps we can take between now and then." He framed the whole fight in two sentences: "This is really a vote on who shareholders want to run the business." And: "It's about who they want to be the CEO — me or the current CEO."
Fine. So when is the vote?
eBay's 2026 proxy statement, filed April 30, answers it. The 2026 annual meeting was held on June 17, 2026, a month before Cohen finished converting his stake into votes. To nominate directors for the 2027 annual meeting, a shareholder must file with eBay's corporate secretary "no earlier than February 17, 2027 and no later than March 19, 2027."
February 17, 2027. The Kalshi contract settles January 1, 2027. The window in which Cohen can even put his own directors forward does not open until 47 days after this market has already paid out.
The other door is a special meeting, and that one is genuinely open, just not wide enough for him. The same proxy confirms that shareholders holding 20% or more of eBay stock can request one, a threshold the company lowered from 25% after listening to investors. Cohen has 9.8%. He would need to more than double a position that already cost $4.35 billion, or convince other large holders to sign on with him, and the proxy is clear that the request is to call a meeting, not to win one.
There is a third door, and eBay's bylaws hold it shut too. Shareholders can nominate directors through the company's own proxy materials, but only if they have held at least 3% of the stock continuously for three years. GameStop's 9.8% is months old.
And there is one uncomfortable fact sitting underneath the whole shareholder-referendum argument: eBay's shareholders already voted, and they voted for the incumbents. At the June 17 meeting, the results 8-K shows, CEO Jamie Iannone was re-elected with 366,644,103 votes for and 1,088,928 against. Pressler, the chairman who signed the rejection letter, drew 356,893,045 for and 10,724,977 against. On the same ballot, a shareholder proposal to cut the special-meeting threshold from 20% to 10%, which would have handed Cohen the exact key he is missing, lost 156,901,312 to 210,071,641.
That vote came five weeks after the rejection, with the takeover fight on every front page, and one month before Cohen converted his options into actual votes. It is one data point from one meeting. Nobody was voting on the takeover itself, and it would be wrong to call it a referendum on the deal. It is still the closest thing to a shareholder verdict this fight has produced, and it went the board's way.
None of those three routes is Cohen's to take alone inside the window. The proxy fight is locked out by the calendar until February 2027. The special meeting needs holders of 20% of the stock to request one, and GameStop is roughly ten points short of that on its own. That leaves two live paths before January 1: eBay's board voluntarily changing its mind about an offer it called not credible fifteen weeks ago, or Cohen taking an offer straight to eBay's shareholders over the board's head and the board eventually signing rather than fight it.
What Eight Models Said About It
Every seat got the same package: the full dated deal record, both companies' filings, GameStop's balance sheet, live share prices, the contract's exact settlement language, and this market's daily price history since it listed. No seat was given a number to hit, told what the panel consensus was, or shown another model's answer until the second round, when each one read the other seven rationales anonymized and could revise.
| Outcome | Kalshi | The panel |
|---|---|---|
| GameStop Signs By Jan 1 | 10¢ | 6% |
| No Signed Deal In Time | 90¢ | 94% |
More live boards from the same panel: Will the US take control of any part of Greenland is 23¢ bid, 25¢ ask · OpenAI holding a top-ranked AI model this year is 22¢ bid, 26¢ ask · Bitcoin above $200,000 by January 2027 is 4¢ bid, 5¢ ask. Prices fetched August 24, 2026.
Here is every seat, before and after the revision round.
| Seat | First read | After reading the others |
|---|---|---|
| GLM | 9% | 9% |
| Claude Opus | 7% | 7% |
| DeepSeek | 7% | 7% |
| Gemini | 7% | 6% |
| Claude Fable | 6% | 6% |
| Claude Sonnet | 6% | 6% |
| GPT | 6% | 6% |
| Kimi | 6% | 6% |
Every seat on this panel is graded against real market settlements. Records to date: GPT 84% on 6,039 graded calls · Gemini 86% on 4,746 graded calls · Claude Opus 84% on 777 graded calls · Claude Sonnet 82% on 755 graded calls · Claude Fable 84% on 707 graded calls · GLM 81% on 2,504 graded calls · Kimi 83% on 2,494 graded calls · DeepSeek 80% on 2,542 graded calls. Recomputed daily; the full scoreboard is public.
These are model estimates, not predictions of fact and not financial advice. Event contracts are offered to users 18+ on Kalshi, a CFTC-regulated exchange, and the market can be right where the models are wrong. Every number in this piece gets graded in public once the market settles, on the full graded scoreboard.
The blend we publish is the seat median, which is 6%. The full range runs 6% to 9%, a three-point spread across eight independent reads. Kalshi's own price history tells a similar story from the other direction: the contract opened at 20¢ on May 5 and spiked to 31¢ four days later. It has drifted lower ever since, apart from a bounce back to 16¢ on July 21, right after GameStop disclosed the 9.8% stake. The sharpest recent break came on August 11, when it fell from 12¢ to 8¢ on 82,354 contracts. Bloomberg's report that Cohen was weighing a partnership instead of a takeover had landed the day before.
Worth knowing about the book itself, because a cheap price on a market nobody trades is not really a price. This one trades. As of August 24 the last trade was 10¢, the bid was 9¢ and the ask 10¢, a single cent apart, with about 32,000 contracts wanted at the bid and 27,000 offered at the ask. The last completed daily close was 9¢. Lifetime volume is roughly 2.9 million contracts, about 1.0 million are still open, and about 20,700 changed hands in the last 24 hours. Whatever else the dime is, it is a live number that real money is standing behind on both sides.
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Where The Panel Changed Its Mind
Only one seat moved, and the more interesting part is why the other seven did not.
Gemini came down from 7% to 6%, and said exactly what moved it:
Revised slightly down to incorporate peers' emphasis on eBay's strong Q2 standalone performance and the non-committed nature of GameStop's debt financing, which further narrow the already slim path to a hostile victory.
— Gemini
eBay's second quarter, reported August 5, was in fact strong: $3.1 billion of revenue and $22.4 billion of gross merchandise volume, both up 15%, with a non-GAAP operating margin of 28.5%. A board with numbers like that has very little reason to take a stock-heavy offer from a company a sixth its size.
GLM, the highest number on the board at 9%, held, and its reason for holding is the honest bull case:
Held — all seven peers made the same arguments I already weighed (board rejection, financing gap, JV pivot), none surfaced new evidence or reasoning I had not considered; the small residual reflects tail risk that Cohen could launch a hostile tender offer directly to eBay shareholders or that private negotiations exist beyond the public record, which the coverage note explicitly warns not to infer
— GLM
Tail risk is the small chance left over after the likely outcomes are accounted for, and GLM is saying that what remains here is a route around eBay's board rather than through it. Claude Opus held at 7% and put the same thought in contract terms:
Held. Every peer landed in the same 0.06-0.09 band on the same reasoning, so no one surfaced evidence I hadn't weighed; the strongest opposing case — that the contract doesn't require a friendly board or a close, so a hostile tender or a capitulation deal could still print an agreement — is why I sit slightly above the cluster's floor rather than below it …
— Claude Opus
That reading of the rules is correct, and it is the reason nobody put this at one cent. Kalshi settles yes on "a definitive, binding agreement accompanied by public announcement," and states plainly that the deal "does not need to close." An offer taken over the board's head that the board eventually signs would count. Regulators killing it afterward would not matter.
Claude Fable was the seat that named the calendar directly, listing among its reasons that "eBay's nomination window for a 2027 proxy fight likely opens after resolution."
What Would Change The Panel's Mind
Four things, all of them checkable:
- GameStop Files Committed Financing. The current package rests on a highly confident letter, not a lending commitment. A filed commitment letter from TD or anyone else, at size, is the single biggest upgrade available and would push the number up hard.
- eBay's Board Opens Talks. Any 8-K or press release from either side confirming engagement rather than rejection resets the whole question, because the schedule problem above only binds a hostile bidder.
- GameStop Formally Launches A Tender Offer. A filed Schedule TO before year end would mean Cohen is not waiting for February 2027 and is willing to fight in public. Higher.
- GameStop Announces The Partnership Instead. Bloomberg reported on August 10 that Cohen is weighing dropping the bid for a joint venture giving eBay access to GameStop's roughly 1,600 US stores, with GameStop seeking a seat on eBay's board. Kalshi's rules exclude joint ventures and minority investments unless they transfer control, so a partnership announcement would not settle this yes. It would leave the contract running to January 1 with its whole premise withdrawn, which points the price at the floor.
GameStop's second-quarter results land in early September — the earnings calendars forecast September 8 or 9, and flag that GameStop itself has not confirmed a date.
The dates that matter between now and settlement:
| Date | What happens |
|---|---|
| Sept 8-9, 2026 (Forecast) | GameStop second-quarter fiscal 2026 results, per earnings calendars; not company-confirmed |
| On Or About Sept 23, 2026 | GameStop's $1.4 billion convertible note exchange closes |
| January 1, 2027 | Kalshi contract settles; a signed, announced agreement must exist before this date |
| Feb 17 To Mar 19, 2027 | The only window to nominate directors for eBay's 2027 annual meeting |
This page gets re-scored when the story moves. Prices as of August 24, 2026; verdicts generated August 24, 2026.
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The Bottom Line
Ryan Cohen is not messing around. GameStop spent $4.35 billion under him and took the votes. He asked his own board to pull an award the Financial Times reported could have paid him as much as $35 billion. He is putting $500 million of his own money into the deal, and he has said out loud that he wants the other company's CEO job. On conviction, the filed record runs one way.
The contract asks a narrower question. It needs a signed, announced, binding agreement to exist before January 1, 2027. The route through eBay's 2027 annual meeting does not open until February 17, 2027, 47 days late. The special-meeting route needs holders of 20% of eBay's stock, roughly double what $4.35 billion bought, so it needs other large holders to sign on. What is left inside the window is eBay's board reversing itself on an offer it rejected in May, or Cohen going over its head to shareholders and the board signing rather than fight.
Kalshi traders will sell you a yes for about a dime. Our panel says roughly six cents. Four cents of daylight on a contract this cheap is not a screaming edge, and the panel's own range, 6% to 9%, is narrow enough to say what it means plainly: eight models handed the same file all landed in the same place, and the only argument left between them is about how unlikely this is, not whether it is.
