Jim O'Brien

Jim O’Brien | Decoding business trends & investing moves | Thoughts are mine, not advice.

[Jim O'Brien @jtobrien]

Gong to get haircut. #Waymo is way mo’ better, safer, cheaper and fun!

[Hater Report @HaterReport]

I’M CRYING 😂😂

[Jim O'Brien @jtobrien]

@Irina_exh 20

[Marta Cecilia Maya López @MartaCecilia36]

Esta película animada es tan relatable. Esto es literalmente mi vida 🥺

[Jim O'Brien @jtobrien]

@markminervini Needed this. Thanks.

[🇺🇸 Larry 🇺🇸 @LarryJones]

I feel confident nobody can check all 20!!

How many can you check off?

1. Used a rotary phone
2. Used a floppy disc
3. Used a typewriter
4. Taken photos with a film camera
5. Listened to music on a CD
6. Listened to a cassette tape
7. Listened to a vinyl record
8. Listened to music on a Walkman
9. Listened to music on a boombox outside
10. Watched a video from a VHS tape
11. Sent or received a fax
12. Recorded music from radio to cassette
13. Rented a video from Blockbuster
14. Accessed the internet by dial-up
15. Used a phone book
16. Sent a postcard
17. Used a paper map to get somewhere
18. Owned a dictionary
19. Owned an encyclopedia
20. Paid with a paper cheque/check

[Jim O'Brien @jtobrien]

@LarryJones I can

[Jim O'Brien @jtobrien]

@alt_w_v_g DCF add variable assumptions.

[Ethan Brooks @alt_w_v_g]

Happy Monday to all of those who celebrate

Time to clock in and deliver shareholder value

[Ethan Brooks @alt_w_v_g]

Just saw a guy pick these up for his wife at the grocery store today on the way home from work.

Tried not to intervene. Could not help myself.

Asked him if he understood the definition of a non-revenue-generating asset.

He looked at me.

Proceeded to explain that flowers are a fully depreciating asset with zero residual value and no quantifiable upside.

Useful life: six days. Eight with the packet.

No cash flow. No terminal value.

He said he had never thought about it like that but it made complete sense.

He set them back down and walked out of the store without buying them.

Saved him $42 and taught a valuable life lesson at the same time.

You are welcome.

Sent from my iPhone

[Ethan Brooks @alt_w_v_g]

My daughter just asked my wife to play house with her.

My wife told her, “Sweetheart, I’m really tired right now. Can we play later?”

My daughter said, “Don’t worry, mommy. I have a great idea. You can just play daddy and sit there on the couch.”

[Jim O'Brien @jtobrien]

Graham Platner’s Wife Flagged Sexually Explicit Texts to His Senate Campaign. The fact that he isn’t more depraved should keep him from a Senatorship. https://t.co/teeKfs8qTl

[Ethan Brooks @alt_w_v_g]

@RobertMSterling Factually correct statement

Try calling her your “first wife” or “ex-girlfriend”

Not sure why saying the truth is a bad thing?

[Ethan Brooks @alt_w_v_g]

Took my wife to dinner to make up for introducing her as my first wife the other night.

Still a factually accurate statement.

But you quantify the opportunity cost, run it through a benefit-effort matrix, and the answer is clear.

"I'm sorry" plus a meal at a 200% markup had a better ROI than explaining that "first" means first.

My analyst confirmed the math. He was at the table. He is always at the table.

Halfway through she smiled at me and said "this is nice."

It was. But the staffing model had been distracting me since we sat down.

Eleven tables. Six turning twice. Four staff front of house, assume three in the kitchen. Food COGS around 28% against the menu. Average check $90. Average diner there 74 minutes.

Our waiter had touched the table fourteen times. Fourteen. I was counting. That is at least nine too many. Each touch is forty-five seconds of lost capacity across his other three tables.

My wife's friend Stephanie recommended this place. Stephanie is married to Rolex Ron. This explains a lot.

Texted my analyst.

He had left during the first course. Something had not agreed with him.

90 seconds later the model came through. Built it from the stall. He carries the laptop everywhere now. Trained him well.

Started to explain the staffing inefficiency to her.

My five-year-old explained it first.

"There's too many waiters, Dad. That man came to our table three times and we didn't need anything. He could have been helping someone else."

Correct.

"At my lemonade stand I don't walk to people who already have lemonade. That's just wasting steps."

My wife looked at the ceiling.

My analyst is going to have competition.

The staffing model is unsustainable.

I left the manager my notes instead of a tip.

He will thank me later.

[Ethan Brooks @alt_w_v_g]

Took my wife to the company dinner tonight

She stepped away to use the restroom

Came back mid-conversation with the CFO and his wife

I said "and this is my first wife"

Because she is. That is a fact.

She looked at the ceiling

Set her drink down

Walked to the car

I still don't know what I did wrong

I was being accurate

[Jim O'Brien @jtobrien]

@alt_w_v_g Nice work on this. So, what is the next move for Ryan?

[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

[Jim O'Brien @jtobrien]

@alt_w_v_g Your wife is not your mom. Time for her children to step up.

[Ethan Brooks @alt_w_v_g]

Think about what just happened today.

We lit a controlled explosion in Florida, sent four humans ~240,000 miles into deep space, slingshotted them around the far side of the moon, and brought them home to a bullseye in the Pacific.

The re-entry capsule hit the atmosphere at 25,000 mph and had to thread a corridor only a few degrees wide. Too shallow and you skip off into space. Too steep and you burn.

They nailed it.

Now picture someone a thousand years ago looking up at that same moon.

They could not have imagined this. Not the math. Not the machine. Not the four people inside it. Not the idea that we would watch it live from a glass rectangle in our pocket on the other side of the world.

And yet people today are confident they know what the next 30, 50, 500 years will look like.

They do not.

No one ever does.

The cotton gin. The steam engine. The lightbulb. The airplane. The internet. The smartphone. Splitting the atom. Walking on the moon.

Every single one of them was impossible until it wasn't.

We are not at the end of the story.

We are barely past the opening chapter.

Humanity will always find a way to win.

Bullish. Always.

Sent from my iPhone

[NoLimit @NoLimitGains]

This is all happening because of one company.