game stop In a potentially “transformative” deal for the company, CEO Ryan Cohen told CNBC in an interview Friday that he wants to acquire a publicly traded consumer company that is much larger than a video game retailer.
“It’s going to be really big. It’s going to be really big. Very, very, very big,” Cohen said of the size of the deal. “This is transformative, not just for GameStop, but ultimately for capital markets as well. This has never really been done before in the history of capital markets.”
Cohen declined to name his company’s targets, saying only that he is looking for undervalued, publicly traded consumer companies that are “high quality, durable, scalable with growth potential” and have “lazy management teams” at the wheel. He claimed that if the investment goes well, “[GameStop’s]value could be in the hundreds of billions of dollars.”
“If it works, it’s genius. If it doesn’t, it’s complete stupidity,” admitted Mr. Cohen, co-founder and former CEO of Chewy. “But we believe we have the components to make it work, and we’re very confident in our ability to make the assets much more efficient…We have the governance structure, we have the capital, we have the operational expertise.”
Mr. Cohen has transformed GameStop from a moribund legacy retailer into a money-making business, but it’s unclear how acquisitions in the consumer sector could increase its value to more than $100 billion, a daunting task for a company with a market cap of $10.5 billion.
An investment banker in the consumer and retail industry was skeptical that Mr. Cohen could pull it off, saying there were few companies in the space that could increase GameStop’s value so dramatically.
“I’ve never seen it,” said the man. “Unless you’re talking about things like fundamental changes in business models, that doesn’t happen in retail.”
Another person agreed.
“It’s easy to say something,” the man said. “That’s much harder to do.”
GameStop’s ambitions to expand were first revealed in early January. The company announced a new all-or-nothing stock incentive for Cohen. This incentive will only be paid if the market capitalization reaches $100 billion and cumulative earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization reach $10 billion.
Mr. Cohen will be paid a salary if GameStop’s takeover plan is successful and the company reaches a market value of more than $100 billion, but he said he wants “all shareholders to receive the same.”
Since becoming GameStop’s CEO in September 2023, Mr. Cohen has significantly cut costs, improved the retailer’s profitability and grown the collectibles business, despite weak overall sales.
Between Q3 2023, when Mr. Cohen took over, and Q3 2025, the most recent quarter, GameStop’s gross profit increased by 7 percentage points, and net income increased from a loss of $3.1 million to $77.1 million. The company posted consecutive annual net profits in FY2024 and FY2025 after five consecutive years of losses.
The company’s success has attracted the attention of Michael Burley, an investor who made a name for himself betting on the U.S. housing market before the financial crisis, and recently revealed he was buying shares.
“Ryan is making lemonade out of lemons,” Barry said in a Substack post on Monday. “He’s running a crappy business and is leveraging the meme stock phenomenon to raise money and squeeze as much as he can while he waits for an opportunity to make a big acquisition of a truly growing dollar-coal business.”
Over the past two years, GameStop has also amassed a cash pile of more than $9 billion in cash on hand and marketable securities (money the company was using to invest in Bitcoin).
Asked if GameStop would liquidate its Bitcoin holdings to finance its acquisition plan, Cohen said, “I’m not ready to say that,” but said his new strategy is “much more compelling than Bitcoin.”
“This is similar to Berkshire Hathaway, except we’re trying to do in a much shorter period of time what Berkshire has done for decades in terms of creating this much value,” Cohen said. “Go in there and chewy And because (GameStop’s) ferocious efficiency mindset increases the company’s profitability so quickly, you can capture more value by focusing on this suboptimal asset and eventually move on to the next asset, but we’ll see what happens. ”
