The boss of the video game retailer Gamestop, Ryan Cohen, is planning drastic job cuts at the trading platform if his bid to buy eBay is successful.
05/06/2026, 07:0205/06/2026, 07:02
He could run this business from home, Cohen said in an interview on the “TBPN” podcast.
Gamestop wants to take over the much larger eBay.Image: keystone
“You have 11,500 employees – and that doesn’t make any sense.” The more employees a company has, the slower it becomes. Cutting costs is the only way to make eBay’s business more efficient. According to the latest information, eBay had 12,300 employees at the end of last year, 7,200 of them in the USA.
Gamestop submitted a takeover offer for Ebay worth around $56 billion over the weekend. According to Cohen, half will be settled in cash and half in shares. However, details of the financing initially remained unclear. Among other things, Gamestop would have to issue a lot of new shares to reach a value of $28 billion at the current price. Cohen now spoke at “TBPN” about bundling the shares of both companies.
At the same time, he confirmed his ambitions: “My goal is: I want to own eBay. I want to run eBay. I want it to be my baby.” At the weekend he said that he wanted to use the combination of Gamestop and Ebay to build a stronger competitor to the world’s largest online retailer, Amazon. Gamestop is significantly smaller than Ebay.
Before joining Gamestop, Cohen co-founded the online retailer Chewy, which specializes in pet products. In 2020 he built up a large stake in the games retailer, whose management he criticized as being too slow in online business, and took over the management position in 2023. He closed many stores and instead focused on trading cards and retro console games that arouse nostalgia among gamers. (sda/dpa)