AggressionRAWR

[Ethan Brooks @alt_w_v_g]

You used to sell stuff on eBay.

Maybe an old camera. Maybe Beanie Babies. Maybe a coat that didn't fit.

You paid a small fee. The buyer got the thing. Everyone went home.

That eBay is gone.

The website looks the same. The logo is the same. The 135 million buyers are still there.

But the company isn't really a marketplace anymore.

It is an advertising business with a marketplace attached for distribution.

Last year, sellers paid eBay $2 billion just to make sure their own listings showed up.

Read that again.

The board calls this growth.

A Canadian who runs a video game store called it something else.

Here is what actually happened.

In 2020 the board hired a new CEO. His name is Jamie Iannone. He arrived with a strategy called focused categories.

In plain English, that means leaning into the stuff people pay extra for. Sneakers. Watches. Trading cards. Auto parts.

The everyday seller, the person with the camera and the coat, was no longer the customer.

The customer was now the seller who would pay to be seen.

In 2025 eBay did $80 billion in transactions. They kept $11 billion of that as revenue. Of that $11 billion, $2 billion came from advertising.

Sellers paid them $2 billion to promote listings on a website those sellers already pay fees to use.

That is the growth story.

In the same year, the number of enthusiast buyers, eBay's own term for their best customers, was 16 million.

It was also 16 million the year before.

And the year before that.

And the year before that.

Four years. Zero growth. They mention this on every earnings call without mentioning it.

So what does a company do when growth stops?

It buys back its own stock.

In 2025, eBay returned over $3 billion to shareholders. Most of that was buybacks. In February the board authorized another $2 billion on top.

Buybacks shrink the share count. Earnings per share goes up even when earnings stay flat. The stock price follows.

The stock was $68 a year ago. It is $108 today.

The company did not improve. The denominator got smaller.

Then a man from Canada noticed.

His name is Ryan Cohen. He runs GameStop. He started his career selling pet food online and sold it to PetSmart for $3.35 billion.

He looked at eBay. 135 million buyers. $80 billion in transactions. Real margins. Real cash flow. A board harvesting the business instead of running it.

He bought 5% of the company through derivatives and stock.

Then on May 4, he offered to buy the rest. $125 per share. $56 billion total.

On May 12, the eBay board rejected the bid. They called it not credible.

The math is credible.

What the board means by not credible is we would have to explain why we sold.

Then Cohen went on Piers Morgan.

He said eBay is run by a bunch of losers with perverse financial incentives.

He pointed out that eBay's CEO has been paid $144 million over six years.

He pointed out that he personally takes no salary and has put $128 million of his own money into the company he runs.

You do not have to like Ryan Cohen to notice he is making a point that is hard to argue with.

eBay used to be a place where regular people sold things to other regular people.

Now it is a $48 billion company whose largest growth driver is charging its own sellers to advertise to a buyer base that stopped growing four years ago, while spending billions a year buying its own stock to make the chart go up.

The board calls this strategy.

A video game CEO from Canada called it what it is.

The market is now waiting to see who else agrees.

Plz fix. Thx.

Sent from my iPhone

[Ryan Cohen @ryancohen]

🎯

[AggressionRAWR @AggressionRAWR]

@rnewton7777 Thanks for continuing to share your thoughts, Richard! I agree completely with your assessment. As always, I hope you are enjoying your well-deserved retirement with your family!

[Ryan Cohen @ryancohen]

on phone with customer support @eBay . please respond @eBay

[Ryan Cohen @ryancohen]

I’m selling stuff on eBay to pay for eBay

https://t.co/REaITX9iXr

[Ryan Cohen @ryancohen]

The people running eBay bought $0 of stock in the open market in the last 5 years.

eBay insiders sold more than $120M in the last 5 years.

[Ryan Cohen @ryancohen]

Proposal to acquire eBay.
https://t.co/FwjcxbDmyt

[Ryan Cohen @ryancohen]

The Hollow Men

American capitalism is rotting from the head down. We have replaced the "Owner-Operator"—the risk-taker-with a new, parasitic class of corporate bureaucrat: The Risk-Free Insider.

By "Insider," I am not referring to a specific title. I am referring to the entire administrative state that has captured the modern corporation. This includes the Directors who exist solely to collect fees, the Executives who exist solely to collect bonuses, and the Managers who exist solely to hire consultants.

These are the hollow men of the boardroom. They are masters of PowerPoint. They wear the right suits. They say the right buzzwords about "governance" and "ESG." But they are mercenaries fighting a war with someone else’s ammunition.

In a functioning economy, authority is tied to liability. If you make a bad decision, you lose your own money. That fear of loss is the only thing that keeps a business honest. It forces you to cut waste, obsess over the customer, and stay late to fix what is broken.

Today, we have severed that link.

We have rigged the game so that heads, the Insider wins; tails, the shareholder loses.

If the stock goes up, the Insider collects a massive performance bonus. If the stock crashes due to their own incompetence, they are fired with a "Golden Parachute" worth tens of millions. They are gambling with the house’s money, and they never leave the table poorer than they arrived.

This looting starts in the boardroom.

We have normalized a "Country Club" culture where directors are selected based on social profiling rather than their ability to build a business. The modern board member is often a professional tourist—paid an average of $350,000 a year.

Let’s be brutally honest about what that number represents. The average director is paid nearly five times the GDP per capita of the United States. They earn more for attending four quarterly lunches than the vast majority of Americans earn in five years of hard labor.

And for what?

Most of these directors are "over-boarded," sitting on three or four boards simultaneously. They treat directorships as a gig economy for the elite. They fly in, rubber-stamp a compensation package they didn't read, and fly out. They collect checks from companies they do not understand, do not use, and certainly do not love.

They are not there to ask hard questions. They are there to be collegial. They are there to protect the other Insiders.

And what happens when these boards hire executives who also have no personal capital at risk?

We get the Delegation Economy.

When a Risk-Free Insider faces a crisis—bloated expenses, a broken supply chain, or a stale product—they do not roll up their sleeves. They hire a consultant. They pay a strategy firm millions of shareholder dollars to produce a 100-page deck telling them what they already know.

This is not management. It is intellectual money laundering.

They use shareholder capital to buy an insurance policy for their own careers. If the plan fails, they can blame the consultants. They delegate the work because they are terrified of the responsibility. They would rather preside over a slow, comfortable decline than risk a bold mistake.

While American Insiders are busy optimizing their severance packages, our global competitors are optimizing their products. They are not slowed down by bureaucracy. They are not waiting for a slide deck. They are outworking us.

If we continue to fill our C-suites with administrators instead of operators, we will lose our edge. We will see iconic American franchises hollowed out by fees, managed for the benefit of the Insiders, while the true owners—the shareholders—are left holding the bag.

The time for polite governance is over.

If we want to save the American economy from mediocrity, we must demand a return to the "Owner’s Mentality." We need leaders who treat shareholder capital with the same reverence they treat their own savings. The era of the Risk-Free Insider must end.

[Larry Cheng @larryvc]

Excited to be celebrating the launch of the new Super73 - MZFT. Congrats to the @super73 team on this launch!

To join in on the festivities, I’ll be giving away one Super73 - MZFT to a randomly selected person who reposts this (will select tomorrow).

https://t.co/ZIgyDF6SqI

[Rapid Response 47 @RapidResponse47]

NUMBER 9: President Trump presides over the end of the 20-year Console Wars 🕊️

[The White House @WhiteHouse]

Power to the Players

[AggressionRAWR @AggressionRAWR]

@rnewton7777 Miss your morning updates. So glad to see you continuing to share your thoughts, and hope retirement with your family is everything you hoped it would be!

[Ryan Cohen @ryancohen]

not bad for a piece of crap retailer

[unusual_whales @unusual_whales]

Ryan Cohen GameStop, $GME, CEO: "They don't give a shit if they make money for their companies."

[Charles V Payne @cvpayne]

Making Money Clips
Special Guest @ryancohen
https://t.co/qrYXGj3lZA

[Ryan Cohen @ryancohen]

If this reaches six figures I will include my underwear

https://t.co/RCUlyiVpfa

[AggressionRAWR @AggressionRAWR]

@ryancohen 🤣🤣🤣

[Ryan Cohen @ryancohen]

Now we know why Buffett is sitting on 300 billion