Ryan Cohen has spent much of his career being dismissed. It is a pattern that has turned the chief executive of video-game retailer GameStop into a leather jacket-wearing outlier with a loyal base of meme-stock investors.
The Canadian entrepreneur turned activist investor has built his cult-like reputation by repeatedly betting on ideas that many institutional investors labelled as absurd. First it was online pet supplies. Then a dying strip mall video game retailer. Now it is a $56bn attempt to acquire eBay, an ecommerce giant roughly four times the size of GameStop.
Wall Street’s immediate response to the hostile bid has ranged from scepticism to outright mockery. Analysts have questioned how GameStop, valued at roughly $11bn, could realistically finance the takeover of a company worth about $47bn.