GameStop CEO Ryan Cohen is targeting a huge deal for consumers

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

“It’s going to be really big. Very big. Very, very big,” Cohen said of the size of the acquisition. “It’s transformative. Not just for GameStop, but ultimately, within the capital markets…and this is something that has never happened before in the history of the capital markets.”

Cohen declined to specify the company’s goals — saying only that he is looking for a publicly traded consumer company that is undervalued, “high-quality, solid, scalable with growth prospects” and has a “sleep management team” behind the wheel. He claimed that if the investment was successful, he would have “the ability to execute.” [GameStop] Its value is several hundred billion dollars.”

“If it works, it’s genius. If it doesn’t work, it’s complete crap,” admitted Cohen, the co-founder and former CEO of Chewy. “But I think we have the ingredients to make it work, and I’m very confident in the ability to make the asset much more efficient… We have the management structure, we have the capital, we have the operational expertise.”

While Cohen has transformed GameStop from a legacy, dying retailer into a money-making business, it’s unclear how an acquisition in the consumer space could boost its value beyond $100 billion — a daunting task for a company with a market capitalization of $10.5 billion.

One consumer and retail investment banker was skeptical Cohen could pull this off, saying there were very few companies in the sector that could significantly increase GameStop’s value.

“I’ve never seen him,” the person said. “Unless you’re talking about radically changing the business model or something, that doesn’t happen in retail.”

Another agreed.

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

GameStop’s volume ambitions first surfaced in early January. The company unveiled a new “all or nothing” equity incentive for Cohen that will only be paid if the market cap reaches $100 billion and sees $10 billion in cumulative earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization.

If GameStop’s takeover plans succeed and its market cap reaches $100 billion or more, Cohen will get a payday — but he said he hopes “all shareholders will” as well.

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

Between GameStop’s third quarter of fiscal 2023, when Cohen took over, and Q3 of fiscal 2025, its final quarter, GameStop’s gross margin grew 7 percentage points and net income rose to $77.1 million, up from a loss of $3.1 million. In fiscal years 2024 and 2025, the retailer posted consecutive annual net income after five straight years of losses.

The company’s success has attracted the attention of Michael Burry – the investor who rose to fame after betting against the US housing market before the financial crisis – who recently revealed he was buying shares.

“Ryan makes lemonade out of lemons,” Bure said in a Monday Substack post. “He has a bad business, and he’s milking it as best he can while taking advantage of the meme stock phenomenon to raise money and wait for the opportunity to make a big purchase of a growing, real cash cow business.”

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

When asked if GameStop would divest its Bitcoin holdings to help fund its acquisition plans, Cohen said he was “not ready to say,” but described his new strategy as “more compelling than Bitcoin.”

“It’s similar to Berkshire Hathaway, except what Berkshire has done for decades, we’re trying to do in a much shorter time in terms of creating that much value,” Cohen said. “We can go there and apply Chewy and [GameStop] A mindset of like brutal efficiency and increasing the profitability of the company very, very quickly, and so we can get a lot more value by focusing on this within the optimized assets, and then we can eventually move on to the next phase, but, you know, we’ll see what happens.