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Comment by bilekas | Hacker News Reader

If they can do some accounting trickery to pull this off then they deserve it. Makes zero sense to me but I did not think GameStop had even close to that in assets.

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It's the leveraged buyout playbook. You buy a company and use its own assets to secure a loan. Then you "find efficiencies" (strip it for parts to pay yourself and the creditors).

In this case, if the deal goes through at the price given, eBay's liquid assets are untouched. The cash portion is paid out entirely through the loan and Gamestop's cash.

> $20 billion in debt financing

This debt will carried by company resulting from merge. It might be not classic leveraged buyout but if they have any trouble with repaying it, it will end in asset liquidation all the same.

That's true. But they also have a $6 billion cash cushion to try to service that debt.

Yes, the loan is the leverage. It's secured against the assets of eBay. If the acquisition fails to produce efficiencies the resulting company has a bunch of extra, arguably unnecessary debt from the acquisition that a free-standing eBay wouldn't have.

Big if.

I think you could frame the debt as lacking necessity but presenting opportunity.

In theory eBay should be one of those bubbly dot-com companies that kind of settled into a lifestyle business by virtue of longevity. It's no longer commanding insane multiples but it has revenue and a dedicated fanbase. They sold off Paypal which was (afaik) the only stable/growing part of the company.

So you're taking a big, but slow-changing auction website and stapling it to a dying brick-and-mortar retail business which survives on meme stock issuance and their die-hard fanbase gambling.

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