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Michael Burry just dumped all his GameStop shares. eBay reportedly deactivated Ryan Cohen's account. And the $56 billion "takeover" GameStop pitched on CNBC? It would actually have eBay shareholders paying for most of it themselves. We're back to break down the latest twists in the GameStop–eBay drama — and why this deal is structured unlike almost any takeover Wall Street has seen.

In this episode, Kristen walks Jen (and you) through the rollover equity mechanics that make this look less like an LBO and more like a SPAC, the precedent Bill Ackman set when he paid $10 million to get the SEC to approve his SPARC, and why levering eBay up at 7–10x puts the combined company at material bankruptcy risk over the next few years. We also get into why eBay might actually want a version of this deal (just not this version), and whether a private equity firm could step in with a cleaner bid,

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🚨 EMERGENCY EPISODE: GameStop just made an unsolicited $56 billion bid for eBay, and the math is NOT mathing. After watching CEO Ryan Cohen's bizarre live CNBC interview with Andrew Ross Sorkin (where he kept deflecting questions with answers like "it's on the website"), we hit *record* immediately to break this down.

Kristen, our resident investment banking, PE, and M&A expert, walks through why this deal defies the laws of physics:

The offer: $125/share, half cash, half stock — roughly $56bn total
GameStop's market cap: under $11bn
Cash needed: $28bn (GameStop has $9bn on hand + a "up to $20bn" TD Bank commitment letter)
Combined company leverage: ~10x EBITDA (a massive LBO is typically 7x — banks don't do 10x)
The $17bn equity hole: where is it actually coming from?

We compare this to the Paramount/Warner Bros deal (spoiler: that one works because Larry Ellison is bankrolling it), unpack GameStop's curious 5% derivative stake in eBay, and explore the theories floating around — CEO comp package triggers, a possible "uno reverse" play to get eBay to bid for GameStop instead, and echoes of the Porsche/Volkswagen hostile takeover.
Plus: Ryan Cohen's background, the dismissed Bed Bath & Beyond pump-and-dump lawsuit, and why no sovereign wealth fund has a strategic reason to write the check.

Got a theory on what's really going on? Drop it in the comments.

Want to learn how to actually run accretion/dilution analyses and tear deals apart like this? Check out our 35+ hour self-paced Investment Banking & Private Equity Fundamentals course, taught by Kristen.

https://thewallstreetskinny.com/premium-self-study/

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Jerome Powell's term as Fed Chair ends May 15th, and his likely successor Kevin Warsh is poised to walk into the most fractured Fed since 1992. In this episode, we're breaking down what actually happened at Powell's final meeting, who the dissenters were and why, and what it tells us about the Fed Warsh is about to inherit.

But the bigger question we're wrestling with is this: what does Kevin Warsh actually want to do? He's been remarkably vocal for 20 years about his views on monetary policy, and his philosophy represents a real regime change — a more unified Fed, less hand-holding of markets, a smaller balance sheet, and a return to the Fed staying in its lane. We walk through who actually sits on the FOMC and how voting works, what quantitative easing really is and why we started doing it in the first place, the difference between monetary and fiscal policy (and why people keep confusing the two), and why "lower rates" doesn't mean the same thing to all people — including why a Warsh Fed could theoretically deliver a cut to the Fed funds rate alongside higher mortgage rates.

We also get into the so-called "Chairman's Curse" — the eerie pattern of catastrophe that has marked nearly every Fed chair transition in modern history — and what event-day risk around FOMC meetings might look like under a chair who wants to communicate less, not more. Plus: Powell's surprising decision to stay on as a governor and the uncomfortable question nobody wants to ask out loud — if we're never going to take our medicine on the deficit, what is the role of the Federal Reserve actually supposed to be?

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