Peyton Petersen

Boutique Marketing Agency 🚀 Lead Generation | Web Design | Branding | Social We blend strategy + creativity to grow your business

[amit @amitisinvesting]

Sat down with Ryan Cohen, CEO of GameStop, to discuss his early starts in business, why he took a stake in GameStop 5 years ago, and why Ebay deserves a new home.

Thank you to @ryancohen for taking the time!

Timestamps:

00:00 - Intro
00:50 - Ryan's Beginnings in Business
05:50 - Why Pets?
12:20 - Why Enter into Gamestop
15:59 - Gamestop's Future
18:21 - Gamestop's Retail Community
23:10 - Collectibles TAM
26:09 - Why Ebay
30:45 - Ebay's response to the offer
36:20 - Ebay's Live Studio Play
38:00 - Agentic Commerce
41:08 - Rapid Fire

[Ryan Cohen @ryancohen]

https://t.co/kVPvOobXU2

[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

[GameStop Power Packs @powerpacks]

A new way to collect. Power Packs are now live.

[Larry Cheng @larryvc]

GameStop FY 2025 Results:

Net sales: $3.6 billion
Net income: $418 million

Full results: https://t.co/Q9ssItiE0X

$GME

[DraftKings @DraftKings]

The 4 men on the ice for Team USA men's hockey OT win:

🔴 Jack Hughes: Canton, MI
⚪️ Zach Werenski: Grosse Pointe, MI
🔵 Dylan Larkin: Waterford, MI
🔴 Connor Hellebuyck: Commerce, MI

And the women’s OT game-winner?

⚪️ Megan Keller: Farmington, MI

Team USA runs through Michigan 🇺🇸

[The White House @WhiteHouse]

Proud to be an American. 🇺🇸🇺🇸

[Barstool Sports @barstoolsports]

This gold medal was brought to you courtesy of the red, white, and blue

[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.

[JACKIE LE' TITS 👑🌈 @Comedyorwat]

I have never been more excited as a $GME holder

And I've been here since October 2020

This is wild

[Fitzzzy 🏴‍☠️ @ShaunFitzzzy]

Burry bought back in

Let’s Fucking Go

$GME

[Michael A.M.E. @MindandEmotion7]

Michael Burry has been buying $GME 🚀

[X Market News🚨 @xMarketNews]

BREAKING🚨 MICHAEL BURRY ANNOUNCES THAT HE OWNS GAMESTOP STOCK $GME

[Cassandra Unchained @michaeljburry]

Final Stop GameStop: The Jig is Up

In Part 1, I outlined how he arrived on the scene – we had a talk in 2019 about GameStop and investing. The Chewy founder then made a big splash as an activist with a Form 13D filing later in 2020.
He has held on with the diamondest hands.
Ryan, the current Executive Chairman, CEO and owner of now about 9% of GameStop stock, ascended to this dual role in September 2023.
Let’s take a look at the business as it stands today.
Here I will introduce the Scion Analyst Template, in parts. This is a Microsoft Word template I put together for my wayward analysts early in 2006. The idea was to get everyone thinking my way about analyzing stocks.
I will now, as I would have in 2006, analyze GameStop stock by working through the template one section at a time.

https://t.co/zlBh9sWfGK

[Reese Politics @ReesePolitics]

Burry with a defining $GME quote here: "Being long GameStop is almost as asymmetric as it gets these days in U.S. common stocks."

Wow. Bullish.

[Michigan State Football @MSU_Football]

This is a REBIRTH. Not a rebuild.

[Ben Devine @Chicago_NFL]

Waking up on this victory Monday! #DaBears

[NFL Memes @NFLMemes]

Packers-Bears recap

[PFF @PFF]

Never count out Caleb "Iceman" Williams 🧊