Pat(ricia)

[Pat(ricia) @materialculture]

@timoreilly Read the 2023 papers @IlPP_UCL searching for answers to understand the chaos at eBay for sellers since 4/1/23 algorithm etc changes. Economic and human costs. Are you aware? @MazzucatoM @IlanStrauss @IIPP_UCL @OmidyarNetwork @pierre

[Pat(ricia) @materialculture]

@cwebbonline @TheSWPrincess Drone needed

[Pat(ricia) @materialculture]

@ValueAddedRS I am so angry for them.

[bad robot ventures @foxenflask]

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.

[Pat(ricia) @materialculture]

Imo it’s a lot more clunky now. Seems was redone to put ebay LIVE into the nav. Ughhh.

[Pat(ricia) @materialculture]

Weeks after rearranging app navigation, ebay finally overlays information meant to instruct users how it works now. Day late dollar short, ebay. 🤦‍♀️. @ValueAddedRS

[domoshi @heydomoshi]

According to the latest 10Q, GameStop: "intends to exercise these options within the next twelve months" 👀

[bad robot ventures @foxenflask]

One of the most quietly bizarre conflicts on the current $EBAY board is Aparna Chennapragada, who has served as an eBay director since 2022 and sits on the Technology Committee. In October 2023, she became Corporate Vice President of Generative AI at Microsoft, the same Microsoft that runs Bing Shopping, a direct e-commerce competitor to eBay. Before Microsoft, she was Chief Product Officer at Robinhood and before that a VP at Google, whose Shopping vertical is eBay's single biggest competitor for buyer intent. She simultaneously holds deep AI product strategy knowledge from Microsoft's most sensitive roadmaps while sitting on eBay's technology and AI-focused oversight committee. Remarkably, nobody has publicly raised this conflict, despite it mirroring the Marc Andreessen situation that Carl Icahn made a national story out of in 2014. Maybe I'm just paranoid.

[Pat(ricia) @materialculture]

@ValueAddedRS 🙈🙈🙈🤦‍♀️

[Pat(ricia) @materialculture]

@ValueAddedRS If it were 2 blocks, that would be convenient. 2 miles in Manhattan - not so much.

[Pat(ricia) @materialculture]

@ValueAddedRS Call me petty but does James have a last name? This first-names- basis posturing is so annoying.

[Pat(ricia) @materialculture]

@foxenflask @ValueAddedRS Does ebay serve the customer? I suppose you have to start with, How does ebay define their customer? If typical sellers fall into that rubric, I’d argue that ebay does less than the minimum to serve that customer and keeps looking for ways to minimize seller service.

[Pat(ricia) @materialculture]

@Forbes Cross listing to other platforms drives revenue away from ebay.

[Pat(ricia) @materialculture]

@Forbes Ebay full time sellers turned to cross posting to other platforms en masse in 2023 because ebay changed the algorithm and rationed visibility to boost adoption of Promoted Listings to goose their fee income.

[bad robot ventures @foxenflask]

Everybody is busy thinking about how $GME is going to put together the money for the $EBAY acquisition, how the equity roll-in is going to work, and where they are going to find a therapist for their non-stop crying. But there is one possibility nobody has seriously considered and I’m quite shocked that they haven’t: maybe GameStop won't need ANY financing.

Why am I shocked? Look at the playbook Ryan Cohen already ran in the past. In 2020, RC Ventures quietly began acquiring shares of a struggling, mismanaged retailer, first a 9% stake, then about 12.9%. He wrote an open letter torching the board's internal incompetence, demanded a strategic review, and leveraged his shareholder position into three immediate board seats in January 2021. Within months the entire executive suite was cleared out, the board was flipped, and he took over.

He never needed to buy GameStop outright because he bought control and let governance do the rest. Fast forward to 2026, GameStop already holds roughly 9% of eBay and is still accumulating, and Proposal 4 on eBay's June 17 ballot would lower the special meeting threshold from 20% to 10%, a proposal that has already cleared 47% support three separate times. If it passes, Ryan only needs to reach 10% ownership to call a special meeting, force a board vote, install his people, and be effectively running eBay before the ink is dry on a single acquisition document.

From there he either accumulates the rest of the float over time like Buffett did with GEICO, or engineers a merger once he controls both sides of the table. That is Icahn's ferocity fused with Buffett's patience, and it is the one scenario nobody on Wall Street or Main Street has modeled. Have a good weekend 🍻

[Pat(ricia) @materialculture]

@ABC Papal Paypal

[Pat(ricia) @materialculture]

@ValueAddedRS

[Pat(ricia) @materialculture]

I always seem to be late to the dance. When did this happen...or did it?

[Pat(ricia) @materialculture]

I always seem to be late to the dance. When did this happen...or did it?

[Pat(ricia) @materialculture]

@ValueAddedRS This reminds me of how eBay suddenly deleted sales history data from Seller Hub, making it impossible for sellers to compare sales pre-2023 algorithm change and subsequent years. That algo change financially ruined many sellers and gave no way to recover lost business.

[Pat(ricia) @materialculture]

Sorry about his um French

[Pat(ricia) @materialculture]

A fellow ebay seller sent me this today concerning a book he had listed on ebay:
@ValueAddedRS