Let me get this straight...
@Devinwenig ran $EBAY. A Massachusetts couple, David and Ina Steiner, wrote a newsletter that occasionally criticized the company. That was the offense.
In response, Wenig authorized a terror campaign. His head of security, Jim Baugh, drove 3,000 miles across the country in a black van to stalk them. Live spiders and cockroaches were mailed to their home. A fetal pig. A funeral wreath left at their door. Death threats. Pornographic magazines sent to their neighbors to humiliate them. All of it orchestrated from inside a publicly traded Fortune 500 company, against two private citizens, because they had a newsletter.
Seven eBay employees were convicted on federal charges. Baugh was sentenced to 57 months in prison. eBay itself was hit with six felony counts, criminal fines, and a court order to address rampant alcohol abuse within its ranks.
Wenig still walked away with a whopping $57 million in 2019!
He then landed on GM's board. Shareholders re-elected him in June 2020, with full knowledge of what had happened. $GM CEO @mtbarra looked the other way. The Steiners spent years pursuing a civil case against eBay and Wenig personally. It was quietly settled in early 2026 on undisclosed terms.
No clawback. No removal. No accountability at the board level. Nothing. Corporate America at it's finest.
GameStop reports highest quarterly net income in company history of $389.6 million. Highest first quarter operating income in GameStop’s history of $143.3 million. Net sales grew 14% year-over-year, driven by collectibles. Cash, marketable securities, digital assets and related receivables, and collateral pledged for derivative asset of $9.7 billion.
https://t.co/BAu3T6V9w4
The best M&A precedent for the $GME x $EBAY deal is InBev’s $52 billion hostile takeover of Anheuser‑Busch in 2008.
Mergers and acquisitions are studied similar to how legal precedent is studied, to get an idea of how something might go down or what will happen next, while knowing that each case is still unique to its set of specifics. A thread.
In 2007, InBev generated about €14.4 billion of revenue with an EBITDA margin in the mid 30s. It was a Belgian Brazilian brewing group that had been publicly listed on Euronext Brussels since 2000, when its predecessor Interbrew did an IPO there, but it was not a company that most U.S. investors followed closely. Anheuser-Busch, by contrast, was a 150 year old American institution with deep political connections and a board that treated itself as untouchable. InBev acquired it anyway.
1/11 🧵
FULL INTERVIEW: @ryancohen explains his plan to acquire eBay.
He unpacks his pitch to institutional investors, why eBay is so horribly run, and how Ryan plans to create billion in shareholder value.
$GME $EBAY