Once. Followed by a tank in price and descent into chaos.

They own eBay + GME + some financial alchemy. If you aren't a financial wizard you should assume that the value of the financial alchemy is negative. (Because 99% of the time it is.) Now, what are the synergies of eBay + GME that outweighs the chaos caused by the merger and the finance stuff?

I’m not totally sure how it would be structured but if GME is the purchaser then the merged company would be listed under GME and eBay would become a brand in the GME group and no longer a stock listed under the eBay ticker.

The whole thing seems incredibly dubious and fishy. The eBay board should vote this down which is why the CEO of GME has already realised that and said he’ll appeal to the shareholders directly. If eBay wanted to load themselves with twenty billion dollars of unnecessary debt and extra complications which would kill the company then they could do it themselves. They’re not in that kind of business.

No, it's not a leveraged buyout

This is not atypical; smaller company “buys” the larger company with debt on the larger company’s books. The blended shareholder mix is mostly the larger company; management comes from the smaller company.

The one I was most familiar with was the Discovery “acquisition” of Warner Brothers. Though apparently that’s a little complicated because AT&T was divesting itself of Warner.

Because it acquires an asset worth roughly that much, it’s neutral. GME is (probably!) not doing a huge at-the-market offering, they’re creating the shares and immediately giving them to eBay shareholders.

In practice the price paid for the company being acquired is usually a bit higher than the market value (so the shareholders take the deal), and the market usually punishes the acquirer a bit and the resulting entity’s stock will fall a bit. (This is most definitely not investing advice.)

the stock they'd be issuing would be for (GameSpot + eBay) whereas the current stock is for GameSpot alone

via a cunning pump on Wall Street Bets

… and the stock has not dropped 39%, in fact it’s trading about where it was a year ago. Shareholders have been content to let Cohen add to the balance sheet, adjust operations and make a large move. This is one such move. And GME is up 5+% in pre trading, so shareholders are generally positive about this idea.

If bagholders were capable of buying low and selling high, they wouldn't be bagholders.

you think all the bagholders are in at the current price?

With the approval of the board of directors (in most cases), a company can simply create new shares and give them to whomever they like.

I would guess that this information will bother you.

If it helps, because many public company executives are compensated on earnings per share, most C level teams are incentivized to buy back shares, thus decreasing the denominator for the EPS calculation without changing fundamental economics of the company.

If this also bothers you, you should guess what Buffet says and thinks about those two dynamics, and then read up on it, and you will learn something interesting about public markets!

I’m sure if eBay wanted to build 1800 brick and mortar stores they could do so for less than twenty seven billion dollars.

Are they under any obligation to ground the value of their own stock or can a salesman simply claim that the "true" value of that stock is much much more than it currently seems to be?

You understand that the gamestop stock would then be owning ebay, thus be worth Ebay + Gamestops Valuation?