> GameStop’s total market value is in the neighborhood of just $11 billion, so it isn’t clear how it would be able to hand over $28 billion of shares. Its share price would somehow have to multiply for this to work.

This isn't mysterious. GME doesn't look like much more than a meme stock with a mediocre business and a MAGA-friendly CEO with a large stock target based compensation target. The proposed merger is not because it is a good combination of businesses, it's because of finance.yahoo.com - Gamestop unveils billion performance

He stands to make $35B if GME market cap hits $100B and the entirety of his comp is based on stock.

GME is a stupid stock (superstonk?). One could consider the bulk of its value as essentially an NFT. GME has low single digit billion dollar revenue with low consumer retailer margins. Share ownership is a conspicuous social identifier for a group of future bagholders being used by more sophisticated shareholders.

There is almost no possibility of the CEO getting to his comp target minus some sequence of poorly conceived LBOs based on the inflated share price (and cash on hand from secondaries, based on the same). There is no sense in this proposed eBay merger. It is corrupt and bad business. But he stands a chance of getting extremely wealthy, and the SEC has been mostly put out of business, aside from selective enforcement based on political reasons.

My prediction is this merger succeeds following roughly the same path as Paramount / WB Discovery.

Everyone should remember that an election was influenced in 2016 by social media manipulation. It looks like we are about to see the same thing happen, but with financial markets, in the upcoming SpaceX and OpenAI IPOs and this deal, among others (see O'Leary's ridiculous UT data center). The window is closing on the opportunity to scam the population of the US and there are some people will act in extreme desperation because of their degree of leverage and/or opportunity. electrek.co - Musk obsession controlling AI tesla agi openai trial is and interest read.

Something seems rotten in AI funding, the elmo-verse, crypto, algorithmic manipulation of new investors, and manipulation of money flow from index based investing. Caveat emptor.