Part IThe Story
On the evening of May 6, 2026, the chairman and chief executive of a company that had just offered $55.5 billion for eBay sat down and started listing things on eBay. Some of them were baseball cards. Some of them were stranger. There was a sealed copy of Dracula for the Nintendo Entertainment System with a small sticky tab on the front of the shrink-wrap. There were sealed copies of Yoshi's Cookie and F1 Pole Position. There was, possibly, a Fallout 4 Vault Boy statue. The stated purpose, delivered in the deadpan that his followers had spent five years learning to read as either a joke or a threat, was to help fund the acquisition. Critics had said GameStop didn't have the cash. Ryan Cohen would raise it one auction at a time.
Within hours, people who had worked at Game Informer, the magazine GameStop had owned for decades and shuttered in August 2024, began recognizing the merchandise. The magazine had kept a room of video game history in its Minneapolis offices, and the editors called it the Vault. "Game Informer editorial treated the Vault like a library, not like a collection to be auctioned off," a former employee told Kotaku, which matched the sticky tab on the Dracula cartridge to photographs of the Vault's holdings. The same employee recalled being fascinated that the sealed games had never been opened — that the staff had been "too afraid to break the seal to play them despite being allowed to." Frank Cifaldi of the Video Game History Foundation said the Vault was being "strip-mined for memes." Ben Hanson, a former Game Informer video producer, said the magazine's history "belongs in a museum, not some schmuck's eBay listings."
At about 11:19 p.m. Eastern, Cohen posted a screenshot to X. eBay had flagged "activity that we believe was putting the eBay community at risk." His caption was six words long. I have been suspended from eBay.
It is worth sitting with the image for a moment, because it contains nearly everything. A man who built one of the great American e-commerce businesses, who sold it for what was then a record sum, who had spent the following years being called the Meme King by people who meant it as an insult and people who meant it as a coronation, was locked out of the store he wanted to buy. The objects he was selling had been kept sealed by people who loved them too much to use them. He was selling them to make a point about money he probably did not need. Whether this was a stunt, a negotiating tactic, a provocation aimed at the financial press, or simply the thing a forty-year-old billionaire does on a Wednesday night when he is angry, nobody could say with confidence. Possibly not even him.
Six days later, eBay's board called the offer "neither credible nor attractive."
By the Numbers
Two Companies, One Ledger
100+Venture firms that rejected Chewy before its first outside check
$3.35BPetSmart's 2017 purchase price for Chewy, then a record for e-commerce
66%Share of Chewy sales from Autoship subscribers by 2018
$1.3B → ~$9.3BGameStop market cap when Cohen joined the board vs. early 2026
47%Cut to GameStop SG&A, from ~$1.7B (FY2021) to $910.2M (FY2025)
$418.4MGameStop net income in fiscal 2025, after years of losses
$0Cohen's salary as GameStop CEO
A Carload of That
Ted Cohen imported glassware. He did it in Montreal, where his son Ryan was born in 1986 into a Jewish family — the mother a teacher, the father a man who, by his son's account, never missed a day of work and ran six miles every morning, including the mornings when Montreal was doing its worst. The family later relocated to South Florida, to Coral Springs, though the profiles do not agree on much about the boy's early years beyond the father. Everything else in the record is soft. The father is hard.
He kept track of the costs other small businessmen let drift: the power bill, the per-unit price on hundreds of different glassware products, the daily price of gasoline as it moved through his transportation costs. He also understood, in a way that does not reduce to bookkeeping, that the ledger had two columns. In one interview his son reconstructed a lesson delivered on a warehouse floor, the father pointing from pallet to pallet. If you take a carload of this, you'll make more money. But if you take a carload of that, you'll make less money, but you'll keep the customer. So, take a carload of that.
Asked whether his father had set out to teach him this deliberately, Ryan said no. "It's who he was."
— Ryan Cohen, to Forbes, on his fatherHis unconditional love gave me the confidence to be misunderstood, to walk away from things that didn't feel right, and to learn from my mistakes.
The phrase the confidence to be misunderstood is the most revealing thing Ryan Cohen has said about himself, and he said it about someone else. Read the rest of his career through it and a great deal comes into focus — the long silences, the cryptic posts, the refusal to explain, the apparent indifference to whether the financial press understood him or found him ridiculous. He was raised, in his telling, by a man whose love did not depend on being understood, and he grew into someone who treated being understood as optional.
At fifteen he was collecting referral fees from e-commerce sites. College is murkier. One account says he never attended; another says he dropped out; when Chewy went public in 2019 he described the IPO to TechCrunch as his baby "graduating from the college that he never went to," which suggests which version he prefers. Either way the father, not the university, is the institution he credits. When Ted Cohen died in December 2019, his son had already sold one company and was a few months from beginning his siege of a second. In 2022, he published a series of children's books called Teddy, built from the lessons, and wrote in the tribute that his father had shown him "an exceptional work ethic and an unwavering commitment to delayed gratification."
Delayed gratification is an interesting thing for a man to name as his inheritance when he would become most famous for his association with a stock that rose 1,500 percent in two weeks. Hold the contradiction. It does not resolve so much as rotate.
Thirty-Pound Bags
In June 2011 Cohen, twenty-five, and Michael Day launched a website called Mr. Chewy. Day is the quieter figure in the founding story — a partner Cohen had met, of all places, in an online chat room, two young men who found each other on the internet and decided to sell dog food on it. The name would later lose its honorific. The inspiration, Cohen said, came from shopping for his poodle, Tylee.
It is hard now to recover how bad an idea this looked. Pets.com had become the totemic corpse of the first dot-com bubble — a company that, as Cohen would later write, was "fast growing, structurally unprofitable, and paid for sales by overspending on advertising," and had crashed and burned less than two years after its 1999 founding. Selling heavy, low-margin, bulky products through the mail was the specific thing the bubble had proved could not be done. And Amazon, by 2011, sold everything.
Cohen pitched more than a hundred venture firms. All of them said no.
"Chewy was hard," he said in 2022, in the first extended interview he had given in more than two years. "We built Chewy in Florida, it was very hard to raise capital, we were a bunch of nobodies." He pointed out that three states — New York, California, Massachusetts — accounted for roughly three-quarters of venture capital, and that Florida's talent pool was thin. "First everyone said pets, you know, you can't make the unit economics work selling thirty-pound bags of pet food, and then once we had positive unit economics everyone said that Amazon was going to crush us, and neither of those things were true."
— Ryan Cohen, CNBC, July 26, 2019I am no stranger to the Pets.com comparison. I heard it when I first started the business and again from nearly every venture capital firm I spoke with on Sandhill Road in Silicon Valley.
He did not take it well, exactly, or rather he took it the way his father's son would. "I was motivated by all the rejections and they just got me fired up," he told Forbes. By March 2012, nine months in, the company was estimating $26 million in annual revenue while losing money. In 2013, Larry Cheng of Volition Capital finally wrote a check: $15 million, the first outside money. Cheng is a minor character in the saga and an important one — the one investor who looked at the thirty-pound bags and saw what Cohen saw, at a moment when that was a career risk. Cohen wrote about the check in the Harvard Business Review with something like filial gravity. "Larry had gone out on a limb for us," he said. "I felt that responsibility."
What Cheng was buying, though it was not obvious from the outside, was a cash machine disguised as a money-loser. Cohen had taken his operational template from Jeff Bezos — specifically, according to Forbes, from Amazon's 1997 letter to shareholders, with its gospel of scale, market leadership, and bold bets. But the part of Amazon he copied most carefully was the part least visible to customers: the cash conversion cycle. "Part of the secret sauce was just how we structured it," he said. "We had negative working capital." Chewy sold its inventory faster than it had to pay suppliers for it. The company grew from roughly $200 million in revenue to $3.5 billion, he said, and "burned through less than 150 million of cash even though we accumulated significant losses."
That is the sentence that explains Chewy. Accounting losses, real cash. A business that looked like Pets.com on an income statement and like something else entirely on a cash flow statement. The doubters were reading the wrong document.
The Handwritten Card
Ask a Chewy customer what the company was, in the years Cohen ran it, and you would not hear about working capital. You would hear about a card.
The company sent handwritten holiday cards. It sent handwritten thank-you notes. It commissioned oil portraits of customers' pets — Bloomberg ran a 2016 story under the headline "Your Dog Deserves an Oil Portrait With Her Gluten-Free Kibble" — and mailed them, unprompted. When a customer called to cancel a food order because the dog had died, Chewy sometimes sent flowers. Nearly one-sixth of the company's employees staffed a twenty-four-hour customer service operation, a ratio that would horrify most retail operators and that was, in Cohen's design, the actual product.
There is a temptation to call this sentimentality, and it is not. It is the second carload. It is Ted Cohen on the warehouse floor: take the load that makes less money and keeps the customer. Amazon had the logistics; Chewy borrowed them. What Amazon did not have, at least in pet supplies, was a reason for a grieving owner to feel anything about the company that had delivered the kibble. Cohen understood that pet owners were not buying a commodity — they were feeding a member of the household, and a business that treated the dog as family would be treated, in turn, as something closer to family than a vendor.
The mechanism that converted the sentiment into economics was called Autoship. Customers signed up for recurring deliveries, and once a forty-pound bag of food arrived at the door every month without anyone thinking about it, the relationship became sticky in a way that mattered enormously to valuation. By 2018, 66 percent of Chewy's sales came from Autoship subscribers. Cohen would later boast that the company's customer retention rates "outpace most software companies," which was, depending on your temperament, either an exaggeration or the whole thesis.
By 2016 Chewy had $900 million in sales and BlackRock and T. Rowe Price's New Horizons Fund on the cap table. It was the largest online pet retailer in the country. By 2017 it had roughly $2 billion in revenue and 51 percent of all online pet food sales in the United States. It had raised another $350 million. Cohen was preparing to take it public.
He was thirty-one. He had kept the company so quiet that Vox, putting him on its Recode 100 list that year, headlined its profile "Ryan Cohen kept Chewy under the radar until it sold for more than $3 billion." Under the radar was not an accident. It was a method he would return to, and then abandon, and then return to.
The Cash Bid and the Stock Bid
Two incumbents came calling before the IPO could happen. Petco wanted Chewy and proposed to pay partly in Petco stock. PetSmart wanted Chewy and proposed to pay entirely in cash — and, crucially, to let Chewy keep operating as a separate business.
Cohen took PetSmart's offer. In April 2017, PetSmart paid $3.35 billion, the largest acquisition of an e-commerce company to that date.
The choice tells you what he valued. Not upside in an acquirer's equity, which would have tied his fortune to the management of a legacy retailer. Not the theater of an IPO. Cash, and the right to keep running his own thing. Cohen stayed on as CEO, operating Chewy largely as an independent unit, and the business kept compounding — from $2.1 billion in sales to $3.5 billion in a single year. Fortune put him on its 40 Under 40 list.
Then, in March 2018, he left. The stated reason was personal goals and family. His successor was Sumit Singh, who had joined as chief operating officer in 2017 after stints at Dell and Amazon — an operator from the house Cohen had spent his career imitating, now promoted to run the imitation. Singh took Chewy public on June 14, 2019, pricing shares at $22, above the expected range, for an initial valuation of $8.7 billion, more than double what PetSmart had paid. A dog was brought to sit in front of the New York Stock Exchange. Chewy's market capitalization would later reach $40 billion.
A month after the IPO, David Einhorn of Greenlight Capital wrote to his investors that the market resembled the bubble of 2000, and that Chewy resembled Pets.com. Cohen, who no longer ran the company and had no obligation to say anything, wrote a rebuttal for CNBC. It is one of the few long-form documents in which he explains himself, and it is relentlessly numerical. Yes, Chewy's market cap was more than thirty times Pets.com's peak; it also did 583 times the revenue, had positive gross margins, and had more than 11 million customers. Pets.com had $6 million in revenue; Chewy had eclipsed $3.5 billion. He quoted Bezos's 2000 shareholder letter back at Einhorn: online selling "is a scale business characterized by high fixed costs and relatively low variable costs. This makes it difficult to be a medium-sized e-commerce company."
What is striking is not the argument but the fact that he felt "compelled to defend the business we built." The company was no longer his. He defended it anyway, the way a man defends a former house he can still see from the road.
What do you do with a fortune when the thing that made it is gone?
Cohen's answer, at first, was the opposite of activism. He bought Apple — enough Apple that he became, by Bloomberg's accounting, its largest individual shareholder, with 1.55 million shares, 6.2 million after the August 2020 split. He bought Wells Fargo. He would accumulate passive stakes in Netflix. Bloomberg's June 2020 headline caught the posture exactly: "A Tech Founder Cashed Out and Bet It All on Apple and Wells Fargo." When the pandemic crash hit in March 2020, MarketWatch calculated that the rout had dealt him a $150 million blow on Apple alone. He did not appear to flinch. It was a concentrated portfolio of very large, very understood businesses — a Buffett portfolio, held by a man who had never been to Omaha's college either.
His father died that December. In 2019, he had formed an investment vehicle called RC Ventures.
In August 2020 he disclosed a stake of nearly 10 percent in GameStop.
There is no way to make this look like a natural successor to Apple and Wells Fargo, and he did not try. GameStop was a dying mall retailer. It had lost $673 million in fiscal 2018. Its own board had tried to sell it to Sycamore Partners and abandoned the effort in January 2019, citing a "lack of available financing on terms that would be commercially acceptable," and the stock fell 27 percent to a fourteen-year low. Michael Burry — the investor made famous by The Big Short, a man whose temperament runs to solitary conviction and long letters — had bought about 3 percent of the company in 2019 and written to the board urging a $238 million buyback, arguing that the coming console generation would still ship with disc drives. But Burry's was a value play: a cheap stock, a decent balance sheet. Cohen was proposing something else. In September 2020, Bloomberg reported his plan to turn GameStop into an Amazon rival.
He raised his stake to 12.9 percent by December 17. On November 16, RC Ventures sent the board a letter, filed with the SEC, and The Wall Street Journal published it. Among its suggestions: close or sell the money-losing European operations. The board, for its part, had been warned before; in March 2020, a group of holders including Hestia Capital had sent what the press called a "threat" letter demanding shareholder representation, and four longtime directors including Dan DeMatteo had stepped down.
It is tempting, in retrospect, to see the father's death and the son's sudden activism as cause and effect. The record does not support that confidently, and the timing may be coincidence. But it is true that the man who had spent eighteen months being a quiet holder of the world's most valuable company went, within a year of losing his mentor, to war with a strip-mall chain over its future.
A Ghost in the Strip Mall
GameStop was older than Cohen thought of it as being, and stranger.
It began in 1984 as Babbage's, a Dallas software store founded by two Harvard Business School classmates, James McCurry and Gary Kusin, named for the Victorian mathematician Charles Babbage, and opened in the NorthPark Center with money from Ross Perot. It sold software for personal computers and then, quickly, games for the Atari 2600 — by 1991 games were two-thirds of sales. It merged with a Minnesota chain called Software Etc. in 1994 and went bankrupt in 1996 when it could not get credit to stock its shelves for Christmas. Leonard Riggio, the chairman of Barnes & Noble, bought the assets out of bankruptcy for $58.5 million; the judge chose his bid over Electronics Boutique's because it kept 108 more stores open. In 1999 the company launched a new brand in thirty strip-mall locations. It was called GameStop.
Then it grew the way only physical retail grew in the 2000s. It bought Electronics Boutique for $1.44 billion. It bought Micromania in France for $700 million. It bought record stores in Norway and converted them. By fiscal 2016 it operated 7,535 stores. Its most profitable line was not new games but used ones — trade-ins carried roughly twice the gross margin of new titles, which is why publishers hated it and why, for a decade, it did not matter that they did.
And then it did. Digital downloads arrived through Xbox Live, PlayStation Network, Steam. The company tried to diversify into smartphone retail through a subsidiary called Spring Mobile, spending an estimated $1.5 billion on acquisitions and stores and recovering about $700 million when it sold the unit in 2018. In 2017, Kotaku revealed an internal sales program called "Circle of Life" that set individual quotas for pre-orders, loyalty cards, and trade-ins; employees described lying to customers to meet them. The phrase — a corporate euphemism for a funnel — has aged badly.
The CEO's office became a revolving door. J. Paul Raines, a former Home Depot executive by most accounts liked by his staff, went on medical leave for a recurring brain tumor in November 2017 and died on March 4, 2018, at fifty-three. His successor, Michael Mauler, lasted from February to May. An interim chief followed, then another, then George Sherman in 2019. In the spring of 2020, as the pandemic closed malls, GameStop briefly argued it was "essential retail." In Massachusetts, according to The Boston Globe, employees were instructed to wrap their hands in plastic bags and pass orders through the door.
This was the business Ryan Cohen wanted to own: a company that had once sold the future, and then had spent a decade insisting the future would come in a box.
Deep Value, and Then the Other Kind
On January 11, 2021, GameStop announced that Cohen and two former Chewy executives were joining its board. The stock jumped.
By then, the most interesting shareholder in GameStop was not Cohen but a thirty-four-year-old marketing professional and chartered financial analyst from Massachusetts named Keith Gill, who posted on Reddit as DeepFuckingValue and on YouTube as Roaring Kitty. Gill had begun buying GameStop call options in the summer of 2019 — roughly $53,000 worth — and had posted his position on the subreddit r/wallstreetbets with a stubbornness that functioned as performance art, updating it after every earnings report, including the ugly ones. "Dude everyone thinks I'm crazy, and I think everyone else is crazy," he wrote in January 2020. "Yea there's deep value, then there's deep fucking value." Gill is in some ways Cohen's double — an outsider with a contrarian thesis, mocked publicly, who held on. The difference was that Gill narrated everything and Cohen narrated nothing.
What happened next has been chronicled exhaustively, in Ben Mezrich's Dumb Money and the film adapted from it, in Spencer Jakab's skeptical The Revolution That Wasn't, in congressional testimony and a 140-page House report. The short version: about 140 percent of GameStop's public float had been sold short — shares lent, sold, re-lent, sold again. Goldman Sachs analysts later noted that short interest above 100 percent had occurred only fifteen times in a decade. The retail crowd on Reddit saw a hedge fund called Melvin Capital on the wrong side of a trade that had no ceiling. The stock, $17.25 at the start of January, closed up 92.7 percent on January 26. Elon Musk tweeted "Gamestonk!!" On January 28, it touched $483 intraday and, briefly, more than $500 before the open. Robinhood halted purchases that morning, citing clearinghouse collateral demands. Melvin, which needed $2.75 billion from Citadel and Point72 to stay alive, lost 53 percent in January and would close on May 18, 2022. Gill's $53,000 was, by January 27, worth $48 million.
Cohen, at the eye of it, said nothing.
That silence is the part people forget. The man whose board seat had ignited the first leg of the rally gave no interviews, made no statements, issued no explanations. When he finally sat for an extended conversation, in November 2022, with Joe Fonicello of GMEdd.com — a fan site run by a retail investor who would later become GameStop's head of social media — he was asked why he had stayed so quiet for so long. "I haven't had time," he said. "I've been focused on work."
Burry, the original value investor, called the squeeze "unnatural, insane, and dangerous" and argued there should be "legal and regulatory repercussions." The two men had both bought GameStop when it was cheap. Only one of them seemed comfortable with what it had become.
What the squeeze gave Cohen was not a thesis but an instrument. Retail investors who had never cared who sat on a retailer's board now followed his every filing. Tens of millions of shares would eventually be moved by their owners into direct registration with GameStop's transfer agent — 76.6 million by June 2023 — so that the holders would own their shares in their own names, outside the brokerage system that had failed them on January 28. Owning the thing, rather than holding a claim on it, became a creed. Cohen had not invented that creed. He would later preach it.
And the mania gave GameStop money. In the following years the company sold stock into the enthusiasm whenever the price ran — a secondary offering of up to $1 billion announced in March 2021; more than $900 million raised in May 2024, after Gill reappeared on X with an image of a man leaning forward in a chair and the stock rose 74 percent in a day. Plus zero-coupon convertible debt. The dying retailer would end up with something like $9 billion in cash. The crowd that thought it was squeezing Wall Street was, among other things, capitalizing Ryan Cohen.
The Owner in the Building
The board seat became a committee chairmanship (March 2021, overseeing the e-commerce transition; the stock rose 41 percent that day to $194.50), and the committee became the chairmanship of the company (June 9, 2021). The chief financial officer, Jim Bell, was gone in February — "forced out," per The Wall Street Journal, as the activist pushed a new strategy. Sherman left. Cohen brought in two former Amazon executives, Matt Furlong as CEO and Mike Recupero as CFO, a direct transplant of the Chewy logic: hire from the company you want to become.
It did not work, or not at first. GameStop announced a non-fungible-token platform in May 2021 that Business Insider described as part of a plan to become "the Amazon of gaming." It launched in beta on July 11, 2022, was quickly embroiled in controversies — a listing referencing the photograph The Falling Man, unlicensed games minted by a user — laid off much of its team that December, wound down its wallet in August 2023 citing "regulatory uncertainty," and closed for good on February 2, 2024. Recupero was fired in July 2022. Furlong was removed in June 2023. The consulting firm BCG sued GameStop for a $30 million fee it said it was owed; GameStop argued the consultants had not improved EBITDA and refused to pay; the suit was eventually dismissed with prejudice.
In the same stretch Cohen was trading elsewhere. In March 2022, RC Ventures disclosed a nearly 10 percent stake in Bed Bath & Beyond and sent its board a letter. In August he sold all 9.45 million shares over four days, for an estimated $68 million profit. A shareholder lawsuit called it a pump-and-dump; it was dismissed in June 2024. He took a stake in Alibaba and, in August 2023, began pressing its board to buy back more stock, which it did, raising its authorization from $25 billion to $40 billion.
On June 9, 2023, he bought 443,842 more GameStop shares, roughly $10 million worth. On September 28, 2023, he became CEO in addition to chairman. He took no salary.
What followed was not a reinvention so much as a subtraction. Fortune counted 11,000 salaried employees in 2023 and 6,500 in 2025. The store count fell from 4,169 at the end of fiscal 2023 to 3,203 a year later and 2,206 a year after that; in January 2025 alone, more than 400 stores closed. Europe, the subject of the 2020 letter, was dismantled: Ireland in 2023 (35 stores, €13 million in severance and lease buyouts, the Dublin headquarters later sold for €5 million), Austria and Switzerland, then Germany's remaining 69 stores, then Italy, sold to a ten-store competitor that rebranded GameStop's locations as Gamelife. Game Informer, the longest-running gaming magazine in the United States, was shut down on August 2, 2024, after thirty-three years.
On February 18, 2025, GameStop announced it would sell its Canadian and French operations. Cohen posted his own version of the press release.
Email M&A@gamestop.com if you're interested in buying GameStop Canada or Micromania France. High taxes, Liberalism, Socialism, Progressivism, Wokeness and DEI included at no additional cost if you buy today!
He was born in Montreal. In May 2025 a Quebec entrepreneur named Stephan Tetrault bought the Canadian business and restored its old name, EB Games. Something about the episode feels like an emigrant settling an account with the place he left, though Cohen has never said so, and there may be nothing to say. He had supported Donald Trump in 2024 and promoted the claim that the 2020 election was stolen, posting on November 8, 2024: "Trump has now won 3 elections in a row." The political Cohen and the operating Cohen are the same man, and they share a vocabulary: contempt for institutions that do not pay their own way.
In March 2025 GameStop announced it would borrow $1.3 billion and buy Bitcoin. In May it disclosed, in an 8-K most investors did not read, that it owned 4,710 coins. Asked on stage by David Bailey whether the company had bought Bitcoin, Cohen said, "Yes. We currently own 4,710 bitcoins," and that was more or less the announcement.
The numbers turned. Selling, general and administrative expenses fell from about $1.7 billion in fiscal 2021 to $910.2 million in fiscal 2025. Collectibles and graded trading cards overtook hardware and software as the largest revenue category. In fiscal 2025, GameStop reported $3.63 billion in sales, $232.1 million in operating income, and $418.4 million in net income. The U.S. division, which had lost $533.9 million in operating terms in 2018, earned $283.2 million. In the first quarter of fiscal 2026, operating income was $143.3 million, the highest first quarter in the company's history. The market cap had gone from about $1.3 billion when he joined the board to roughly $9.3 billion. Was losing hundreds of millions of dollars every single quarter, Cohen would say; making a lot of money now.
On January 7, 2026, the board granted him a stock option award valued in the press at roughly $35 billion — 171.5 million shares at $20.66, in nine tranches, vesting only if GameStop simultaneously reached market-cap and cumulative EBITDA targets culminating at $100 billion and $10 billion. No salary, no bonus, no time-vesting stock. Only the outcome. In June 2026, at his own request, he gave it up.
Elephant Hunting
"It's within my circle of competence," Cohen told Anthony Pompliano in an interview filed with the SEC on May 13, 2026. "It's a business that I understand. It's the second largest e-commerce asset in the United States, and it's a business that is under earning." Then something less Buffett-like and more like the son of a man who never missed a day: "I want to run eBay. I want to own eBay."
GameStop had disclosed the proposal on May 3: $125 a share, half cash and half GameStop stock, about $55.5 billion, a 46 percent premium to where eBay had traded before GameStop began accumulating it. GameStop already held about 5 percent through shares and derivatives. The pitch was Chewy's pitch and GameStop's pitch fused: GameStop's roughly 1,600 U.S. stores as a physical network for authentication, fulfillment and live commerce in collectibles; $2 billion in annual cost cuts within twelve months; an owner-operator replacing a hired management team. eBay was worth more than $48 billion. GameStop was worth about $10 billion. Pompliano, not a man given to understatement, called it "the ultimate elephant hunting."
The next morning, on CNBC's Squawk Box, Cohen gave an interview that the network itself described as "awkward and at times combative." Pressed on financing, he repeatedly directed viewers to the company's website. The stock fell about 10 percent. Michael Burry, who had spent months promoting what he called an "Instant Berkshire" thesis for GameStop — a cash-rich holding company run by a disciplined owner — sold his entire position. "I of all people should have known," he wrote. The debt load required, he argued, would "border on distressed." Steve Soltis, a communications lecturer at the University of Virginia's Darden School, wondered aloud whether the awkwardness was strategic. "Cohen is no dummy," he said. "This felt almost too obviously calculated to me."
Then came the eBay listings, the sealed Dracula, the suspension at 11:19 p.m. Then the rejection on May 12. Then, on May 13, Piers Morgan Uncensored, where Cohen said what he actually thought.
— Ryan Cohen, Piers Morgan Uncensored, May 13, 2026I don't like the board of directors. I have such disdain for these people that make millions of dollars in risk-free compensation, and everything is done in the name of corporate governance.
eBay, he said, was "run by a bunch of losers." The board that had collected $4 million in director fees the previous year would be "kaput. They are gone." On Burry: "There is going to be leverage, more leverage than he likely anticipated, but I don't want to run a leverage business." He called the professional managers "country club executives." He said the problem was less the financing than "an entrenched board" with "zero skin in the game."
He kept buying. By mid-July GameStop owned 9.75 percent of eBay, second only to Vanguard's index funds. GameStop shareholders authorized up to 2.5 billion Class A shares, currency for a larger stock component. By August GameStop's market value had slid to about $8.6 billion — barely above the $8.4 billion in cash on its balance sheet. Its stock was down 28 percent since the offer; eBay's was up 7.6 percent. On August 10, Reuters, citing Bloomberg, reported that Cohen was weighing a withdrawal of the bid in favor of a joint venture in which eBay could use GameStop's stores for trading cards and collectibles and GameStop might seek board seats. Neither company confirmed it.
The man who disdained boards was, in the end, asking for a seat on one.
The Dog in the Background
Back to the night of the listings, and the question it raised: what is real here, and what is performance?
It is a question that has followed Cohen since the squeeze, and he has never answered it, and he may regard the asking as the point. The Meme King and the turnaround CEO are not two people; they are one man who learned from his father that love does not require being understood, and who extended that freedom to markets, to journalists, to directors, to Canada. He can cut $800 million in annual expenses with the patience of a glassware importer tracking the price of gas, and he can also list the contents of a closed magazine's archive on a website he is trying to buy, at night, to prove something to people he holds in contempt. The two acts are not in tension in his head. They are both refusals to defer.
The sealed games in the Game Informer Vault had stayed sealed because the people around them loved them too much to open them. That is one kind of delayed gratification. Cohen's is another. He would not take a salary. He gave back a $35 billion option grant. He sat on Apple. He waited out more than a hundred rejections and two years of silence. And then, sometimes, he breaks the seal on everything at once.
In November 2022, at the start of the first long interview he had given in more than two years, his dog began barking somewhere off camera. Fonicello, the host, tried to keep going. Cohen stopped him to make sure the audience could hear it, and then, because he knew exactly where he was and who was watching and what they would assume, he added a clarification.
"It's a real dog, by the way. It's not just sound effects."
Part IIThe Playbook
Cohen has built one company from nothing and rebuilt another from near-nothing, and the two efforts look less different than the headlines suggest. Both depended on a cash cycle more than on a narrative; both treated the customer relationship as an asset that could be compounded; both began with the explicit rejection of what credentialed people said was possible. The record also contains failures — the NFT marketplace, the first wave of Amazon hires, a $55.5 billion bid that, as of August 2026, appeared to be shrinking into a partnership. What follows are the principles that survive contact with both the wins and the losses.
The principles
- 1.Go where the corpse is.
- 2.Read the cash flow statement, not the obituary.
- 3.Industrialize the unscalable gesture.
- 4.Sell for terms, not headlines.
- 5.Fight the analogy with arithmetic.
- 6.Get paid only for the outcome.
- 7.Subtract before you build.
- 8.Inventory the assets no one is pricing.
- 9.Hire from the future, fire on the owner's clock.
- 10.Use silence as a balance-sheet item.
- 11.Stay inside the circle — and know its edge.
- 12.Spend provocation like capital.
R
Decisions That Defined the Arc
The key choices, in order, from dog food to eBay.
2011
Launches Mr. Chewy with Michael Day in Florida at age 25.
2013
After 100+ rejections, takes $15M from Larry Cheng at Volition Capital.
2017
Chooses PetSmart's all-cash, stay-independent offer over Petco's part-stock bid: $3.35B.
2018
Steps down as Chewy CEO; Sumit Singh, ex-Amazon and Dell, takes over.
2020
Builds ~13% GameStop stake; November letter urges exiting money-losing Europe.
2021
Joins board in January; becomes chairman in June; installs ex-Amazon CEO and CFO.
2023
Removes Furlong; becomes CEO in September with no salary.
2025
Sells Canada and France; buys 4,710 bitcoin; posts $418.4M net income for the year.
2026
Bids $55.5B for eBay; rejected; drops his own $35B option award; reportedly weighs a joint venture.
Principle 1
Go where the corpse is
Cohen has twice chosen the category most conspicuously marked as a graveyard. In 2011, online pet supplies meant Pets.com, the bubble's emblematic failure. In 2020, mall-based video game retail meant a company whose own board had tried and failed to sell it. In each case the prevailing story was so complete that nobody was checking whether its assumptions still held.
The assumptions had changed. In 2000, Cohen noted in his 2019 op-ed, only 22 percent of Americans had ever bought anything online; by 2011 the logistics, payment rails and consumer habits that Pets.com lacked were all in place. In GameStop's case, the obituary was correct about the old business and blind to the cash the mania would deliver and the collectibles market growing in the same stores. A dead category keeps the competition away long after the reasons for its death have expired.
Tactic: Make a list of the categories your industry treats as cautionary tales, and for each one write down the specific condition that killed it and whether that condition is still true.
Principle 2
Read the cash flow statement, not the obituary
Chewy accumulated large accounting losses for years. It also, in Cohen's account, grew from about $200 million to $3.5 billion in revenue while burning less than $150 million in cash, because it turned inventory faster than it paid suppliers. Negative working capital meant growth financed itself. Skeptics looking at the income statement saw Pets.com. The cash flow statement described a different animal.
This is the most transferable lesson in the record and the least glamorous. It is Ted Cohen tracking the power bill and the price of gas. It is why Cohen could survive on a single $15 million institutional check for a crucial stretch, and why he spoke of Chewy's structure, not its marketing, as "the secret sauce."
Tactic: Before raising your next round, model whether renegotiating supplier terms or accelerating inventory turns could fund the same growth, and raise only the difference.
Principle 3
Industrialize the unscalable gesture
Handwritten cards, oil portraits of pets, flowers when a dog died: these look like founder sentiment, the kind of thing that disappears at scale. At Chewy they did not disappear, because Cohen staffed for them — nearly one-sixth of employees in round-the-clock customer service — and connected them to a mechanism, Autoship, that converted goodwill into recurring revenue. By 2018, two-thirds of sales were automatic.
The gesture is not the strategy. The gesture plus the subscription is. It is the father's second carload: accept less margin on the interaction to own more of the relationship, then build the plumbing that lets the relationship pay.
Tactic: Identify the single most emotionally charged moment in your customer's life with your product, design a human response to it, and attach a retention mechanism to the same touchpoint.
Principle 4
Sell for terms, not headlines
In 2017 Cohen had an IPO in preparation and two strategic suitors. Petco offered partly in stock; PetSmart offered all cash and operational independence. He chose the cash and the autonomy, stayed to run the business, and grew it from $2.1 billion to $3.5 billion in sales in a year. Two years later the IPO valued Chewy at more than double the sale price, which some would read as money left on the table. Cohen's own behavior suggests he read it differently: certainty of proceeds and freedom to keep operating were worth more to him than optionality in an acquirer's equity.
Tactic: When comparing offers, score each on certainty of value and on your operating freedom after closing, not only on headline price.
Principle 5
Fight the analogy with arithmetic
Cohen heard "Pets.com" from almost every venture firm on Sand Hill Road and again from David Einhorn after the IPO. He never answered it with vision. He answered it with ratios: 583 times the revenue, positive gross margins, 11 million customers, a scale business explained in Bezos's own words. Analogies win arguments because they are vivid; they lose to specific numbers because the numbers show where the analogy breaks.
Tactic: For every lazy comparison made about your company, prepare three numbers that quantify precisely where the comparison fails.
Principle 6
Get paid only for the outcome
Cohen takes no salary at GameStop. When the board gave him a roughly $35 billion option package, it was entirely performance-based, vesting only if market capitalization and cumulative EBITDA hit tenfold targets simultaneously. He later asked the board to cancel it so management would stay focused on operations and the eBay bid. He bought $10 million of GameStop stock in June 2023. His contempt for eBay's directors — "millions of dollars in risk-free compensation" — is the same principle turned outward.
The posture creates legitimacy with shareholders that compensation committees cannot manufacture. It also has a cost: a leader with nothing to lose but equity may be more willing to swing for a deal four times his company's size.
Tactic: Restructure at least part of your own compensation so that it pays only if the outcome your owners care about is achieved, and say so publicly.
Principle 7
Subtract before you build
The GameStop turnaround is, by the numbers, a story of removal. SG&A down 47 percent. Salaried staff down from 11,000 to 6,500. Stores down from 4,169 to 2,206 in two years. Europe, Canada, Game Informer, the NFT team: gone. The 2020 letter had proposed exiting European losses; the company spent the next five years doing it. Only after the cost base was cut did collectibles and graded cards become the largest segment and the U.S. division swing to $283.2 million in operating income.
⇄
Two Turnarounds, One Method
How the Chewy build and the GameStop rebuild rhyme — and where they diverge.
| Lever | Chewy (2011–2018) | GameStop (2021–2026) | Phase |
|---|---|---|---|
| Market consensus | "Another Pets.com" | "Dying mall retailer" | Scan |
| Cash engine | Negative working capital | Equity raised into mania; zero-coupon converts | Scale |
| Primary move | Add service, add subscription | Cut costs, exit geographies | Try |
| Talent source | Built from scratch in Florida | Imported from Amazon and Chewy | Try |
| Misfire | None decisive in the record | NFT marketplace; first leadership team | Risk |
| Endgame | Sold for $3.35B in cash | $55.5B eBay bid, then reported JV talks | Risk |
Tactic: Before approving any new initiative in a struggling business, require that a cost of equal or greater size be removed first.
Principle 8
Inventory the assets no one is pricing
When analysts saw GameStop, they saw obsolete stores. Cohen, by 2026, was describing those same 1,600 U.S. locations as a national network for authenticating and fulfilling collectibles — the core of his pitch to eBay. He also recognized that a volatile, crowd-loved stock is itself an asset: by repeatedly issuing shares when the price ran, GameStop accumulated roughly $9 billion in cash. The stores and the stock were both priced by the market as liabilities. He treated them as raw material.
Tactic: List every asset your company owns that the market values at zero or below — locations, brand, community, volatility — and write one sentence on how a different buyer would use each.
Principle 9
Hire from the future, fire on the owner's clock
Cohen's instinct at GameStop was to import the company he admired: two ex-Chewy executives on the board, two ex-Amazon executives as CEO and CFO. The instinct was partly wrong — Recupero was fired within about a year, Furlong removed within two, and the NFT pivot those years produced was abandoned. What the record shows is not that importing talent works, but that an owner can afford to correct quickly. Hired boards protect hires; Cohen did not.
Tactic: When you bring in executives from the company you aspire to resemble, agree in advance on the metrics and the date by which you will judge them.
Principle 10
Use silence as a balance-sheet item
Chewy grew to a $3.35 billion sale while staying, in Vox's words, "under the radar." Through the January 2021 squeeze, Cohen said nothing. He gave no extended interview for more than two years, and when asked why, said he had been focused on work. GameStop's Bitcoin purchase surfaced in a routine 8-K. Silence denied competitors a roadmap and let the retail crowd project conviction onto him at no cost.
The eBay campaign is the counter-case: a combative CNBC appearance, a 10 percent drop, Burry's exit, an eBay suspension. When Cohen spoke loudly, the market charged him for it.
Tactic: Default to disclosure only when it is legally required or strategically decisive, and treat every unforced public statement as an expense to be justified.
Principle 11
Stay inside the circle — and know its edge
Cohen justified the eBay bid in Buffett's language: "It's within my circle of competence." E-commerce is where his record is strongest. The NFT marketplace sat outside it and failed. The eBay bid sat inside it operationally and outside it financially — a $10 billion company, by August worth little more than its cash, trying to buy one worth roughly $48 billion. Knowing a business is not the same as being able to pay for it.
Tactic: For any major bet, write two separate tests — "Do I understand how this business works?" and "Can I fund it without changing who I am?" — and require a yes to both.
Principle 12
Spend provocation like capital
Cohen's provocations are not incidental to his power; they built the following that financed GameStop's balance sheet. But they also have a price. The Canada-and-France post, the eBay listings that appeared to sell off a closed magazine's archive, the "losers" remark — each energized loyalists and hardened opponents, including an eBay board he needed to persuade. Burry, his earliest co-thesis holder, left. The Soltis reading — that the awkwardness was strategic — may be correct, but strategy that drives a target's board to call your offer "neither credible nor attractive" is strategy with a cost.
Tactic: Before a public provocation, name the specific counterparty whose cooperation you will need in the next twelve months and ask whether the statement makes that cooperation cheaper or more expensive.
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Part IIIQuotes and Maxims
In their words
— Ryan Cohen, Teddy tribute, 2022My father, Ted Cohen, and his lessons have guided me throughout my life. He showed me an exceptional work ethic and an unwavering commitment to delayed gratification.
— Ryan Cohen, GMEdd.com interview, November 20, 2022First everyone said pets, you know, you can't make the unit economics work selling 30 pound bags of pet food, and then once we had positive unit economics everyone said that Amazon was going to crush us, and neither of those things were true.
— Ryan Cohen, Harvard Business Review, on Volition Capital's first investmentI was even more committed to making Chewy an industry leader, because it was no longer just our own money on the line. Larry had gone out on a limb for us. I felt that responsibility.
— Ryan Cohen, to Forbes, on 100+ investor rejectionsIt was the opposite. I was motivated by all the rejections and they just got me fired up.
— Ryan Cohen, interview with Anthony Pompliano, May 13, 2026It's within my circle of competence. It's a business that I understand.
Maxims
- Take the carload that keeps the customer. Lower margin on the transaction is the price of owning the relationship.
- The obituary is not the audit. A category declared dead keeps competitors away long after the cause of death has expired.
- Profit is an opinion; cash is a fact. A business that turns inventory before paying for it can survive losses that would kill a competitor.
- Sentiment needs plumbing. The handwritten card matters only if a subscription is attached to the mailbox it arrives in.
- Answer analogies with ratios. "Another Pets.com" loses to "583 times the revenue."
- Choose certainty and freedom over headline price. All cash and the right to keep operating can beat a bigger number in someone else's stock.
- Cut before you create. In a broken business, the first growth strategy is removal.
- Get paid when the owners get paid. No salary, no bonus, only the outcome — or no standing to criticize those who take the risk-free pay.
- Silence compounds; noise is billed. Quiet years built two fortunes; one loud week cost a deal its credibility.
- Understanding a business is not the same as affording it. The circle of competence has a financial edge as well as an operational one.
