5 Things GameStop Should Buy With $56 Billion Instead of eBay
5 Things GameStop Should Buy With $56 Billion Instead of eBay
Courtesy of us, your favorite financial investment advisers.
By LRG Team
U.S. video game retailer GameStop made headlines this week when CEO Ryan Cohen announced his bid to purchase rival retailer eBay—who, like GameStop, does a brisk business in used video games—despite eBay having roughly twice the market cap as GameStop. Even more remarkable is that the bid clocks in at a jaw-dropping $56 billion dollars. An ambitious plan for the game retailer, which has left many people baffled.
Honestly, we all know that this will never work. It’s eBay. Shill bidders are gonna run up the price before someone else snipes it. So, we’ve come up with a few ideas for how to spend that cash more productively.
5. The Island of Tuvalu
The Island of Tuvalu (pop. 10,000) generates a gross domestic product of about $70 million per year, much of that coming from selling use of its top level internet domain address—the highly desirable .tv suffix—to people with cool URLs around the world. There’s an opportunity here for GameStop to acquire a home base for a truly magnificent revival of GameStop TV.
(Better yet, they could invest that money into climate change mitigation technology so that Tuvalu doesn’t vanish beneath the ocean in a decade.)
4. The Funko Pop Orbital Ladder
GameStop sells Funko Pops, as you know. Funko Pops stand about 4” high and cost $15. Low Earth Orbit is approximately 100 miles above the surface, or roughly 6.5 million inches. So it would take about 1.6 million Funko Pops stacked up to create an orbital ladder that would allow someone to climb to the nearest space station—a total cost of about $24 million. Of course, a single stack of vinyl figures wouldn’t bear the weight of such a prodigious tower, so we’d need to create a much wider base... but that’s OK, because $56 would buy enough Funko Pops that every layer of the stack could consist of 2,300 figures, far more than you’d ever need. Heck, for $56 million, you could buy enough Funko Pops to build a stack of figures that reaches the moon and back... twice. With aerospace engineering genius like this at hand, who needs SpaceX?
3. TCGplayer
Alternatively, if GameStop really wants to expand their secondhand sales options without going tens of billions of dollars into debt, why not start with something more modest, like TCGplayer? That sure isn’t going to cost $56 billion, but the platform is a massive hit and revenue generator... at least if the fact that half the Limited Run team uses its services is any indication, that is.
2. 56 Billion Arby’s Roast Beef Sandwiches
But only during the “5 for 5” promotion! Keep an eye on your Arby’s app, Mr. Cohen.
1. An AI Company
Isn’t that what everyone’s doing these days? Banking everything on a moonshot AI gamble? Now, we don’t recommend this move because we think AI is the inevitable future or anything. No, the appeal is that it would allow GameStop to get their hands on the supply of computer memory and hard drives that the AI companies have cornered for the next couple of years... which means they could then go into business reselling those computer components back to us teeming masses, who no longer have the option to buy them.
Do it, GameStop. Be the heroes we need right now.