W- where does he rank in your rotation as we speak right now?

now?At the beginning of spring training, they took a ton of shots.

They went with Germán Márquez, Walker Buehler.

They ended up getting Giolito early in the season, Griffin Canning, and it was kinda who's gonna be the one to step up? Hopefully two or three of them do, and it turns out that really only one of them did.

And Walker Buehler's season's been a tale of multiple seasons in a lot of ways.

He's had a really good stretch in the middle of the year.

It got ugly for a second the back half, and then the last four or five starts have been a lot better.

So in a let's, let's call it the wildcard round, if you're able to line up the starting pitching, what's... what are we doing?

Um, are you excited?

Very excited.

Um, I'm a little frustrated that the Mets are playing well for the first time all year, as soon as my Padres come to town, but Padres are playing well, so it should be a good series.

I'm excited.

Oh.

I'm going with a Padres fan tonight, and then I'm going with, uh, Kevin Hartgrave tomorrow, 'cause we're doing interviews with the players on the field before the game.

And, and they're basically asking, like, what's the payoff for them in accepting that dilution?

There's different forms of dilution.

Most dilution is dilutive to shareholders.

When you're buying a business and I've committed to pulling $2 billion of costs out, so if you do the math, I'm buying a business for $56 billion, and the business is forecasted to make over $3.5 billion, that's, uh, that's the consensus for 2026.

Plus what, uh, what I would be pulling out in cost, so you're at over $5.5 billion of EBITDA, and then the ability to take this platform and build a much, much larger business The upside is huge.

So I wouldn't go and buy a business if I didn't think I can take it from 56 billion and turn it into multiples larger.

So it's accretive to shareholders, but most of the time when companies are issuing shares, it's dilutive, and earnings per share goes down.

Like, what is this, the synergistic play here between eBay, the e-commerce business, and GameStop, which right now is a brick-and-mortar business selling video games, consoles, collectibles?

I posted on X that you were coming on the show and, and, you know, in the context of, of what you've done with financial mechanics of late, you know, the, the question that existing GameStop shareholders sent to me over and over again is, you know, you're asking them to accept pretty significant dilution, and, and they're basically asking, like, what's the payoff for them in accepting that dilution?

There's different forms of dilution.

Most dilution is dilutive to shareholders.

When you're buying a business, and I've committed to pulling $2 billion of costs out, so if you do the math, I'm buying a business for $56 billion, and the business is forecasted to make over three and a half billion, that's, uh, that's the consensus for 2026.

Plus what, uh, what I would be pulling out in cost, so you're at over five and a half billion of EBITDA, and then the ability to take this platform and build a much, much larger business, the upside is huge.

So I wouldn't go and buy a business if I didn't think I can take it from $56 billion and turn it into multiples larger.

So it's accretive to shareholders, but most of the time when companies are issuing shares, it's dilutive, and earnings per share goes down.

Like, what is this, the synergistic play here between eBay, the e-commerce business, and GameStop, which right now is a brick-and-mortar business selling video games, consoles, collectibles?

Do you believe in building long-range operating plans? Meaning, would you articulate a strategic vision for eBay and then write out what you're gonna do over the next three, four, five years so that the shareholders that are considering your acquisition offer can see both your vision and your plan for execution on that vision over the next several years? Or are you much more of a responsive manager where you're gonna go in and diagnose and be much more of a tactician in iterating almost in an agile way the business to success? How do you kinda think about presenting how you're gonna be more successful in operating this business than existing management?

So there are three areas.

Number one is on immediately improving earnings through cutting costs and pulling two billion dollars of costs out of the business.

And on the operating base of, you know, close to five and a half billion of expenses, um, and two point four billion spent on sales and marketing for essentially no user growth, um, there's a lot of money to pull out there.

So you have the immediate increase in earnings through cost-cutting.

That's basically one.

And then there's two growth vectors that, um, I'm very much interested in.

Yeah

He said this.

I was surprised by their lack of understanding, um, of, uh, of the structure, 'cause it's very simple.

It's half cash, it's half stock.

Uh, we have the ability to issue stock.

Uh, essentially the eBay shareholders are gonna continue owning eBay, except it's gonna be run by an owner/operator as opposed to an entrenched management team, um, that has zero invested and zero skin in the game.

And the other half of the structure, we've got nine billion of cash on our balance sheet, and our bankers have advised us that they feel confident in our ability to raise 20 billion.

Uh, so it's a straightforward deal, but, um, you know, it was, it was too complicated for them on CNBC.

Mm.

So whatever the expenses are today, how much do you think you can break it down percentage-wise? Like, can you cut 20% of expenses, 50%?

I mean, it's a business that's spending over $5.5 billion on $11 billion in revenue to run a business that essentially has no inventory and is very asset light.

So, you know, $2 billion in cost cuts.

Um, I, I mean, if you look at GameStop as a good example, and I, I've committed to $2 billion in cost cuts at eBay, but if you look at GameStop as an example, uh, you know, we've cut out f- uh, we- SG&A's been reduced by 47%, and that was actually a business that it was very difficult to cut costs.

Like, there wasn't a lot of fat to cut at GameStop.

Um, it was already, for the most part, efficiently run and not a high-margin business.

eBay is basically like, if you...

[laughs]

What do you say t- to everyone who doesn't think this adds up?

Well, first of all, in terms of skepticism, there's, uh, always been a lot of skepticism around GameStop.

It's a business that was highly shorted, um, and everyone was betting against it, and it should've gone bankrupt many times over, and it didn't, and now it's highly profitable.

Chewy, there was a lot of skepticism going head-to-head against Pets.com and then competing against Amazon.

In this case, uh, there, it's less about the actual financing and it's more about dealing with, uh, an entrenched board and management team that ultimately if this transaction goes through, they rejected it, and, uh, overall they were right.

It's not attractive to them because if this deal goes through, the board that made $4 million in director fees last year is kaput and they're gone, and the management team that's making hundreds of millions of dollars in risk, risk-free compensation and has never, the CEO has never invested a dollar of his own money since being CEO.

So that's the problem.

If you were to get your hands on it, what would be the things you would immediately do to try and be more competitive with Amazon?

Yeah

... uh, that is it gonna be real, and the trust, and that's something that using GameStop's 1,600 stores, we can immediately authenticate that item.

The seller can ship it or we can ship it, but we've got 1,600 access points that we can do live authentication.

So we can go deep in collectibles, leveraging our physical infrastructure.

We can increase, uh, intake by bringing a lot more product onto the platform, and then there's a lot of other categories that I can, I can grow in.

And, uh, you know, you look at live commerce as an example.

I mean, eBay has 130 million users, and they're getting crushed by competitors in live commerce.

Yeah

Yeah

... uh, that is it gonna be real and the trust, and that's something that using GameStop 1,600 stores, we can immediately authenticate that item.

The seller can ship it or we can ship it, but we've got 1,600 access points that we can do live authentication.

So we can go deep in collectibles, leveraging our physical infrastructure.

We can increase, uh, intake by bringing a lot more product onto the platform.And then there's a lot of other categories that I can, I can grow in.

And, uh, you know, you look at live commerce as an example.

I mean, eBay has 130 million users, and they're getting crushed by competitors in live commerce.

Yeah

In fact, I, I am sure that if you were the CEO of eBay and the board of C- of eBay today, you would say, "I don't know whether they have the money to be able to do this." And they're watching us now, and other investors of eBay are watching us now, and they're not gonna call eBay's board and say, "You need to talk to these people," unless they understand how this all is supposed to work.

Well, we have a 5% stake in eBay.

It makes us one of the largest shareholders, so they have a fiduciary duty to their shareholders to evaluate this proposal.

Uh, and in terms of the actual earnings power of the business, this is a business that is under-earning and can make a lot more money.

And GameStop is a good blueprint for that.

Obviously, you know, you, you guys thought the business wouldn't be where it currently is, and eBay could be making a lot more money.

So there's gonna be some leverage on the balance sheet in order to make an acquisition possible.

Since you, uh, put this news out yesterday afternoon, have you heard from anybody at eBay or people behind the scenes, advisors and the like?

Yeah.

Finally had his big breakout last year.

He's one of the best left-handed relievers in the game so far.

Campuzano's the other one.

In 2023 he hit, '24 was a tough year, '25 Mike Schilt just said, "You're not playing, buddy." And he didn't get a single hit in the big leagues last year, despite being the best hitter in triple-A.

This year finally gets a shot under Craig Stammen, and he's been great.

I don't think he's a 350 hitter for the whole season, but the bat isn't...

Yeah

Sure.

So, uh, like autonomous driving as an example.

Everyone with, like, GM, Ford, all of the big OEMs, they're finished 'cause there's gonna be autonomous driving.

No, it's, it's...

Uh, when it comes to AI, it's a big problem.

At some point, the computers are going after the humans and I don't think it's that far away.

I think that the sci-fi movies when it comes to AI...I feel it.

When, when public company CEOs talk about how much efficiency they're getting out of AI, do you think that they're actually getting efficiency out of AI or do you think they're just, uh, pushing their teams harder to be more efficient and, uh, they wanna blame, blame the impact on, on AI?