When the investor who called the 2008 housing crash walks away from a position, the market pays attention. Michael Burry, the Scion Asset Management founder made famous by The Big Short, confirmed Monday that he exited his entire GameStop (NYSE: GME) stake — and the reason behind the move cuts straight to the heart of one of the most audacious M&A proposals in recent memory.
The trigger: GameStop’s unsolicited, nonbinding offer to acquire eBay (NASDAQ: EBAY) for approximately $55.5 billion in cash and stock — a deal that would be roughly four times the size of GameStop itself.
The Deal That Broke the Thesis
GameStop CEO Ryan Cohen announced Sunday that the company has offered $125 per share for eBay, structured as a 50/50 split between cash and GameStop common stock. The bid carries a roughly 20% premium to eBay’s last closing price and a 46% premium relative to where the stock traded in early February — around the time GameStop began quietly accumulating a 5% stake in the e-commerce platform.
To fund the cash portion, GameStop has secured a nonbinding highly confident letter from TD Bank for approximately $20 billion in debt financing. The company also holds roughly $9.4 billion in cash. However, a significant funding gap remains, with estimates suggesting the deal falls roughly $16 billion short of the implied transaction value — a gap Cohen suggested could be bridged through additional stock issuance.
Cohen’s vision centers on leveraging GameStop’s roughly 1,600 U.S. retail locations as fulfillment and drop-off points for eBay transactions, along with a targeted $2 billion in annualized cost reductions within 12 months of closing. He sees eBay as a severely undermanaged asset with the potential to significantly grow its earnings under tighter operational discipline.
Why Burry Left
Burry’s exit wasn’t impulsive — it was disciplined. His investment thesis for GameStop was built around the idea that the company could evolve into a Berkshire Hathaway-style holding vehicle: lean, cash-rich, and deploying capital conservatively. The eBay deal, as structured, blows that framework up entirely.
The pro forma leverage from the transaction would push the combined company’s Debt/EBITDA ratio well above 5x — a level that Burry had identified as a hard ceiling for his investment case. Interest coverage ratios under 4.0x further complicated the math. Burry noted on his Substack that this was his first sale since launching the newsletter, underscoring how seriously he viewed the deal as a departure from GameStop’s core value proposition.
GME shares fell more than 2% in after-hours trading following Burry’s announcement and have declined over 10% from recent highs.
Burry’s departure doesn’t necessarily doom the deal or GameStop’s stock — but it does crystallize a growing tension between Cohen’s aggressive growth ambitions and the disciplined capital allocation thesis that attracted institutional-minded investors to GME in the first place.
eBay has acknowledged receiving the proposal and confirmed its board will review the offer. Markets remain skeptical — eBay shares are trading well below the $125 offer price, a clear signal that investors are pricing in a low probability of the deal closing as proposed.
For small and microcap investors watching from the sidelines, the GameStop-eBay saga is a masterclass in how quickly an investment thesis can be rewritten — and why leverage assumptions matter as much as the deal itself.