GameStop is a zombie company. As a retailer, they have been floundering for years and still are. But as a corporation, they are sitting on a lot of cash and zero debt, from the early-pandemic period they went through as an overvalued meme stock.

They can't afford $56 billion - the proposed acquisition was going to be halfway paid for in stock and halfway via a loan. (Though, they also can't afford $28B in stock - the entire company is only worth $10B - so the idea was going to be to pay for it by issuing new shares of the merged GameStop-Ebay entity, after the deal was signed.)

If that sounds audacious, it's because it is - as far as I've seen, most analysts were not expecting this deal to be taken seriously, and many are calling it a publicity stunt.

Based on their CEO's angry refusal to explain further in TV interviews, it doesn't seem like they can, which is why eBay said that it wasn't a credible offer. It sounds like this is just a way to get a few more headlines for GameStop to keep their meme stock value a bit longer, along with a claim that they're being treated unfairly (which isn't substantive, but then again neither is the basis for their meme stock value, so that might be irrelevant to the ones this PR is attempting to target).

They cannot

The stock became a meme