Film studios may soon consider optioning a new GameStop movie. Call it Dumb Money 2: It Just Got Dumber.

GameStop is worth about $12 billion, but wants to acquire eBay—worth $48 billion—in a deal for $125 per share. That mismatch raises the obvious: How would GameStop pay for a company four times its size?

That’s exactly what the talking heads on CNBC wanted to know when they interviewed GameStop CEO Ryan Cohen this morning. Instead they got Cohen in a leather jacket at 8am providing awkward responses, long pauses, and tense replies over basic funding math that mostly boiled down to, “We will see what happens.”

Shares of GameStop had fallen 2.94% before the interview began. They ended the day down 10.14%, while eBay shares rose 5.05% to $109.33—well below the implied offer value, typically a sign investors aren’t fully convinced the deal will go through.

The plan

Despite Cohen’s non-answers, there are a few details of the potential deal that we know so far. GameStop has quietly built a 5% stake in eBay since early February, and it would pay for the deal in both stock and cash, backed by about $9 billion already on GameStop’s balance sheet and a reported $20 billion financing commitment from TD Bank.

GameStop is pitching the deal as a turnaround story. It plans to cut $2 billion in eBay’s annual costs within a year of the deal’s completion, largely targeting the online marketplace’s $2.4 billion sales and marketing spend, which GameStop says has failed to drive meaningful user growth. On top of that, it’s positioning its 1,600 US stores as physical infrastructure for eBay, according to the press release.

But while the two companies overlap in categories like gaming, collectibles, and toys, eBay is significantly larger and more diversified. It’s not immediately clear what GameStop brings that meaningfully enhances eBay’s core marketplace beyond financial engineering and cost-cutting, though Cohen seems confident he can turn the combined company into a “legit competitor to Amazon.”

Buyer beware

The disastrous CNBC interview spotlit Cohen’s financial incentives behind such a deal. His revamped compensation package could deliver up to $35 billion in stock-option awards if GameStop hits a $100 billion valuation, among other performance targets, raising questions about whether the deal creates shareholder value, or is simply an attempt to create a massive payday for the CEO.

It’s also worth noting that Cohen told CNBC his company could potentially issue stock “in order to get the deal done,” which would dilute the value of investors’ current holdings.

A sign of the times

This isn’t the first time that a company has tried to bite off more than it can chew. Just weeks ago, Paramount Skydance won the bidding war for Warner Bros. Discovery—a reminder that, in the right environment, scale alone isn’t a barrier.

But the return of these types of deals starts to feel like almost anything can be financed, as long as you’re comfortable dealing with the debt later. That doesn’t necessarily make the deals wrong, but it does suggest a market where ambition is being underwritten a bit more loosely, and where the line between bold and stretched is starting to blur.

For now, we’ll just have to “see what happens.”—SY

🟢 What’s up

• Circle popped 20% and Coinbase jumped 6.14% as investors reacted to revised stablecoin legislation moving forward in Congress.
• Sandisk jumped 5.8% after Bernstein analysts predicted the stock could climb to $1,700—35% higher than where it closed today.
• Tyson Foods rose 7.96% after delivering better-than-expected quarterly results.
• Celcuity surged 15.38% as its experimental breast cancer drug succeeded in another Phase 3 trial milestone.
• GlobalFoundries gained 4.38% after unveiling new AI-focused optics technology, riding an analyst upgrade by Cantor Fitzgerald.
• Global Business Travel Group surged 57.5% after agreeing to a $6.3 billion take-private deal.

What’s down

• Norwegian Cruise Line fell 8.56% after slashing its full-year outlook amid higher fuel costs and softer demand tied to the Iran conflict.
• FedEx lost 9.11% and UPS dropped 10.47% as Amazon unveiled a competing supply chain service.
• Berkshire Hathaway slipped 0.97% after disclosing a record $397 billion cash pile and no plans to spend it.
• AMD declined 5.27% following an HSBC downgrade tied to concerns over chip supply constraints and reliance on Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company.

On the surface, Big Tech earnings look sterling—there’s no denying that the top dogs of the market are raking in the dough. But Ben Snider, Goldman Sachs’ chief US equity strategist, warns that these recent numbers are not as sturdy as they seem.

In a note late last week, Snider dove deep into the earnings reports of hyperscalers—the biggest AI spenders, namely Amazon, Alphabet, Meta Platforms, Microsoft, and Oracle—and discovered something odd: Earnings growth among this group was given a serious boost by the stakes each company holds in private startups.

“Alphabet and Amazon generated “other income” totaling $53 billion in Q1 2026, which accounted for nearly 60% of those two companies’ income in Q1 and 34% of the total $155 billion in income this quarter across the five largest hyperscalers,” Snider wrote. “This represents the group’s largest collective share of earnings attributable to “other income” in at least a decade. Of this $53 billion in “other income,” $49 billion was explicitly due to equity stakes in private companies.”

In other words, a growing portion of those healthy Big Tech earnings are being underpinned by the rising valuations of their stakes in private companies. For example, Amazon owns between 15% and 20% of Anthropic, while Microsoft holds about a 27% stake in OpenAI’s for-profit business. That’s all well and good when those private companies continue to grow—but if AI isn’t as revolutionary as promised and their valuations go up in smoke, it could be a big problem for Big Tech.—MR

Blackstone, Goldman Sachs, Hellman & Friedman, and…Anthropic? No, this isn’t just a list of companies to invite to the least fun party of all time.

A group of Wall Street firms are teaming up with AI mega-unicorn Anthropic to create a new company that will teach mid-size companies how to use AI tools and deploy Claude in their business operations, the Wall Street Journal reported today. The new joint venture will be a consulting arm of Anthropic, and recruiting customers shouldn’t be a challenge, given it will be selling Anthropic’s products to firms backed by the very same asset managers funding the company in the first place.

Some pretty hefty dollar signs are behind this project.

• Anthropic, Blackstone, and Hellman & Friedman are going to invest about $300 million each, according to the WSJ, while Goldman Sachs is investing about $150 million.
• Other investors include General Atlantic, Sequoia Capital, Apollo Global Management, and GIC.
• Overall, roughly $1.5 billion is expected to be invested in the project.

AI giants are desperate to get the products they’ve spent billions creating out to actual customers. With this venture, Anthropic hopes it can implement Claude in a range of sectors, from healthcare to real estate and beyond.

The reason Anthropic is targeting private-equity-backed companies is that private equity investors are notorious for being ruthless with cost efficiency, so it makes intuitive sense that they would be all-in on superhuman robots that can operate quickly. Main competitor OpenAI has reportedly been contemplating a similar idea, putting together about $4 billion for its own PE-backed venture called The Development Company.

Anthropic is making moves

The announcement today comes as AI titans have embarked on a serious dealmaking spree recently, mostly focused within the tech world.

Just last week, the Department of Defense announced partnerships with eight tech firms, including OpenAI, Google, and Nvidia. Anthropic was excluded from the deal, given the Pentagon has been feuding with the startup over its objection to its tech being used for autonomous weapons and mass surveillance. Now, Wall Street is getting in on the deal action.

But be warned: Analysts have raised questions about the increasingly entangled nature of the circular web that is AI financing, warning that the entire economy could implode if it turns out we’re riding a wave of tech froth more than actual innovation. For now, the doubts haven’t stopped the giants from pushing full-steam ahead into all things AI.

And hey, when your startup replaces you with a bot, now you’ll know who to thank.—LB

• Here’s what to watch this week as the blockbuster trial between sworn enemies Elon Musk and Sam Altman continues.
• The Justice Department has launched a probe into the meatpacking industry focused on surging beef prices, just in time for burger-grilling season.
• GLP-1s are creating an entirely new market for hair loss drugs.
• World Liberty Financial is suing Justin Sun for defamation after the crypto entrepreneur launched his own lawsuit against the company last month.
• The FDA flagged a case of liver failure in a patient taking Eli Lilly’s Foundayo GLP-1 drug.
• Jane Street interview memes are going viral, and we can’t get enough of them.

Economic reports: The spotlight is on the labor market this week, and tomorrow’s monthly Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey kicks things off.

Earnings announcements: A new week of reports hits its stride with quarterly updates from AMD, Super Micro Computer, Arista Networks, Microstrategy, PayPal, Shopify, Pfizer, and Ferrari, among many others.

Everything else: Tomorrow is Cinco de Mayo, celebrating the 1862 victory of Mexican troops over invading French forces at the Battle of Puebla, though these days it’s better known as a day for indulging in Mexican cuisine and margaritas.

Alright nerds, let’s see how you did:

Q: Which Star Wars film had the biggest total worldwide box-office?

A: The hype of a new trilogy should not be underestimated: Star Wars: Episode VII – The Force Awakens hauled in $2.071 billion.

Q: Which film had the best ROI (a movie’s returns divided by its costs)?

A: 2016’s Rogue One achieved an incredible 95.4% ROI thanks to (relatively) measly costs of just $327.5 million.

Q: How much did it cost to build the original Death Star (give or take a couple quadrillion dollars)?

A: Back in 2015, financial engineering professor Zachary Feinstein from Washington University of St. Louis calculated that it would cost $852 quadrillion (that’s 15 zeros) just for the steel used to construct the first Death Star. Add in electronics, labor, and the myriad other expenses of building a moon-sized laser station, and he suspects the total bill ran up to $193 quintillion (that’s 18 zeros).