GameStop CEO Ryan Cohen targets consumer mega deal

GameStop wants to acquire a publicly traded consumer company that’s far larger than the video game retailer in a deal that could be “transformational” for the company, CEO Ryan Cohen told CNBC in an interview Friday.

“It’s gonna be really big. Really big. Very, very, very big,” Cohen said of the size of the acquisition. “It’s transformational. Not just for GameStop, but ultimately, within the capital markets … this is something that really has never been done before within the history of the capital markets.”

Cohen declined to name the company’s targets – saying only he’s seeking a publicly traded consumer company that’s undervalued, “high quality, durable, scalable with growth prospects” and has a “sleepy management team” behind the wheel. He claimed if the investment pans out, it has the “potential to make [GameStop] worth several hundreds of billions of dollars.”

“If it works, it’s genius. If it doesn’t work, then, you know, it will be totally, totally foolish,” Cohen, the co-founder and former CEO of Chewy, acknowledged. “But I believe we have the components to make it work, and I’m very confident in the ability to make the asset much, much, much more efficient … we’ve got the governance structure, we’ve got the capital, we have the operational expertise.”

While Cohen has transformed GameStop from a dying legacy retailer into a money making business, it’s unclear how an acquisition in the consumer space could increase its worth to over $100 billion – a herculean task for a business with a $10.5 billion market cap.

One investment banker in the consumer and retail space was skeptical Cohen could pull it off, saying there are very few businesses in the sector that could increase GameStop’s value so dramatically.

“I’ve never seen it,” the person said. “Unless you’re talking about radically transforming a business model or something, it just doesn’t happen in retail.”

Another agreed.

“It’s easy to say something,” the person said. “It’s a lot harder to do it.”

GameStop’s ambitions to balloon in size first came to light in early January. The company unveiled a new, all-or-nothing equity incentive for Cohen that will only pay out if it reaches a market cap of $100 billion and sees $10 billion in cumulative earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization.

If GameStop’s acquisition plans succeed and its market value hits $100 billion or more, Cohen gets his payday — but he said he hopes “all shareholders do” as well.

Since taking over as GameStop’s CEO in September 2023, Cohen has dramatically cut costs, improved the retailer’s profitability and grown its collectibles business, even as overall sales have sagged.

Between GameStop’s fiscal 2023 third quarter, when Cohen took over, and its fiscal 2025 third quarter, its most recent quarter, GameStop’s gross margin has grown by 7 percentage points and net income has climbed to $77.1 million, up from a loss of $3.1 million. In fiscal 2024 and 2025, the retailer posted consecutive annual net incomes following five straight years of losses.

The company’s success has attracted interest from Michael Burry — the investor who became famous after betting against the U.S. housing market ahead of the financial crisis — who recently disclosed that he’s been buying shares.

“Ryan is making lemonade out of lemons,” Burry said in a Monday Substack post. “He has a crappy business, and he is milking it best he can while taking advantage of the meme stock phenomenon to raise cash and wait for an opportunity to make a big buy of a real growing cash cow business.”

Over the last two years, GameStop has also amassed a more than $9 billion cash pile between cash on hand and marketable securities – money the company had been using to invest in bitcoin.

When asked if GameStop will liquidate its bitcoin holdings to help fund its acquisition plans, Cohen said he was “not prepared to say,” but called his new strategy “way more compelling than bitcoin.”

“It’s similar to Berkshire Hathaway, except what Berkshire did in decades we’re attempting to do in a much shorter time in terms of creating that much value,” said Cohen. “We can go in there and apply the Chewy and [GameStop] mindset of like brutal efficiency and increase the profitability of the company very, very quickly and so we could capture a lot more value by focusing on this under optimized asset, and then eventually we could move on to the next one, but, you know, we’ll see what happens.”