Ben Fall

$GME. Love me some silver and gold, and strong dividend stocks. 🇨🇦 Pokémon PSA collector. Jesus Christ is King, God in the flesh

[Ben Fall @ap3nat1on]

@FilmUpdates Top Gun Maverick

[screencaps @screenscaps]

dune: (2021)
dune: part two (2024)
dune: part three (2026)

[frostzy @lmkifiwin]

a horror movie made for $750,000 is about to become one of the most profitable films ever made.

Obsession - shot in 20 days in Alabama by a 26-year-old YouTuber with no stars in the cast - is now eyeing a $250 million+ box office finish. that's a return north of 300 times its budget. it's already the highest-grossing release in Focus Features history.

now look at what the industry spent that same money on:
- Joker: Folie a Deux - ~$200 million budget. a punchline.
- Mickey 17 - ~$118 million. forgotten in a month.
- The Mandalorian & Grogu - $165 million, 7 years, the entire Lucasfilm machine. it's currently losing the weekday box office to... Obsession.

Hollywood keeps insisting you need $200 million, a pre-sold IP, and a marketing budget the size of a small country to make a hit. then a guy with a camera, a wish-granting toy, and three weeks in Alabama outearned all of them on a rounding error of their catering bill.

the most profitable movie of the year cost less than a single second of screen time in the average blockbuster. turns out audiences never wanted the budget. they wanted a good movie.

[Colin @colin_gladman]

Just did weekly VC with the team and WOW there are some nice setups going forward.

500 likes and I’ll share some of my favorites into the week.

[Colin @colin_gladman]

@TJTheWheelDeal God
Family

Work

Friends
Hobbies

[bad robot ventures @foxenflask]

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 🧵

[Ryan Cohen @ryancohen]

🫪

[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

[Roaring Sensei @RoaringSensei]

GameStop CEO @ryancohen - Full interview with Piers Morgan - Discussing @gamestop's bid to buy out @eBay! Power to the Players. 🔥 $GME #GME

[Anthony Pompliano 🌪 @APompliano]

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

[Ben Fall @ap3nat1on]

@JediZarkiido Fucking right 🤝

[Liz Morton ~ Value Added Resource @ValueAddedRS]

@PhantomBlack699 Ryan Cohen: taking the message direct all week long, even to eBay's sellers.

$EBAY Board: let's call in expensive consultants to send a boilerplate email to the one person we know is sure to mention it publicly.

They're making the Hollow Men points for him at this point.🤣

[Ben Fall @ap3nat1on]

@GoodGuyFerri hey so monthly skins aren’t a problem , so can we get our CWL skins for the Minion Prince and Dragon Duke 🤩 thank you! I have 4/4 CWL skins

- a fellow passionate clash try hard 😂

[Stonkfather 🏴‍☠️ @Stonkfather2021]

So the eBay board clearly believes the company is worth more than $125 a share

Here’s a list of prices they’ve sold shares at in the past 12 months:

$109
$103
$97
$92
$85
$79

[Ben Fall @ap3nat1on]

@PeterRHann1 Same here Peter. The combination that he will be able to make with GameStop X EBay X Powerpacks will be awesome.

And more of course but even just the surface is exciting

[Fitzzzy 🏴‍☠️ @ShaunFitzzzy]

Nice write up @ValueAddedRS

“Notably, the comments section on eBay’s YouTube channel remains closed to comments, while Justin’s video has already garnered over 700 comments that express far more enthusiasm than anything I’ve seen at any eBay seller event I’ve covered in the last 5 years.

Power to the players just met power to the sellers - it looks to be the beginning of a beautiful friendship.”

https://t.co/dupG7u3ZXt