My name is Lauren Thomas, and I am a deals and activism reporter here at The Wall Street Journal.
And Lauren, we 're talking to you because there was a proposed merger and acquisition,
proposed deal that caught a lot of people's eyes recently.
Can you tell us what that is?
Yes.
Big headline number for sure.
GameStop officially submitted a proposal, a $56 billion proposal to acquire eBay.
GameStop, which is worth about $11 billion,
was offering to buy a company four times that size, eBay, the commerce giant.
What did you think when you heard that?
Yeah, I mean, probably like everyone else was scratching my head a little bit.
You don't often see these smaller companies coming out and trying to buy much larger businesses.
So that in and of itself, I think, provides some shock value.
So Lauren called the man behind this audacious plan, Ryan Cohen, the CEO of GameStop.
Walk through like what ultimately led you to eBay?
I think that eBay under my watch, it really comes down to like scale.
Yeah.
Being able to do something big.
You're right.
And I think eBay, there's nobody who is more qualified based on my experience to run the eBay business.