GameStop chief executive officer Ryan Cohen has the chance at a major, major payday if he can make good on a goal set for him by GameStop's board of directors. Amidst discovering that GameStop would be shutting down hundreds of stores in the United States , we also learned that if Cohen successfully turned the company that's worth a staggering $100 billion , then he would earn a $35 billion bonus . And now, it seems that Cohen has a plan on how to make that happen.
Speaking to the , the plan is essentially to buy his way to that growth by expanding beyond more than just being a video games retailer. Cohen plans to acquire a publicly traded company in a " big " deal, with the Journal identifying he'll be looking " likely in the consumer or retail industry ."
On his plan, Cohen added, " It's ultimately either going to be genius or totally, totally foolish ."
Currently, GameStop is worth about $11 billion . To earn the full $35 billion bonus, Cohen would have to turn GameStop into a $100 billion market-cap company and reach a $10 billion EBITDA measure. Even when GameStop had its meteoric meme-stock rise back in 2021 , the company's market cap peaked at $33.7 billion , which falls more than a few billion short of Cohen's goal.
That said, the Journal's report adds that Cohen could still earn a partial bonus by increasing the company's market cap beyond $20 billion and reaching a $2 billion EBITDA measure. It won't be the full $35 billion, but if Cohen can manage to recreate some of the success that the company lucked into in 2021, he'll be able to take some sort of bonus home.
" There are a lot of diamonds in the rough…that have sleepy management teams ," Cohen said about his plan and the layoffs GameStop has already been through. " I didn’t fix GameStop to stop there ." The jury is still out as to whether Cohen did actually fix GameStop, which seems more interested in making meme and troll-centred comments online and closing stores than selling video games, but since Cohen did this interview with the Wall Street Journal, the company's stock was up 3.5% this morning.
Follow to get more of our news coverage in your feeds.