GameStop

“Well, when it came to GameStop, originally it was a passive investment and I owned under five percent and the CEO actually reached out to me because they were fighting an activist and they wanted me to join the board.”

“The original thesis was that there's an upcoming console cycle and that they're probably going to survive until the upcoming console cycle and the new PlayStation and Microsoft Xbox comes out.”

“I went in and I had this bias from Chewy, which is basically like everything that I learned at Chewy, I was going to apply to GameStop. And it took me about, I don't know, maybe Just over a year to realize that was really, really stupid.”

“You can bring in a, Graded PSA card eight and above, and we will give you cash on the spot. We buy back the card, and then we either sell it in the store, or we bring it back to our warehouses, and we sell it online.”

“I'm putting five hundred million of my own money into this transaction.”

“We made an offer yesterday. 125 bucks a share. Half cash, half stock.”

“We've got 1600 access points that we can do live authentication.”

“Yeah, it would be partnering with creators. I mean, they've got the platform, We would improve the platform so it looks better and more consistent with the kind of UI that you have at competitors, but there's the user base. And so it's not something you have t…”

“And if you look at SG&A, we've pulled out, we've dropped SG&A by 47%, eight hundred million dollars, by making marketing more efficient, almost turning off marketing.”

“My current compensation plan is tied to really lofty metrics, and it's based on the first tranche I've got to double market cap, as an example, just to hit the first tranche, and the 10 exit in order for it to fully invest.”

“I haven't taken a dollar of salary or any bonuses”

“We have the cash accounted for today in terms of, ah, a highly confident letter from our bank for the twenty billion, plus we've got nine billion of cash, so.”

“This was part of what appealed to me originally when I went into GameStop was the leases were short term. So they're like two to three year leases.”

“Well, that would, so yes, and it would basically take zero dollars in capex in order to something like that, and it's a good idea.”

“We are, we've we have, the return rates are kind of high, but we're building out the retro business in our stores currently. So that's a, it's a, it's still small, but it's a growing category for us.”

“If you pull up eBay's 10 K from February, fiscal 25, and I did not understand this until I read it, eBay spent 2.4 billion dollars on marketing. How many new users did they get for that? I mean, you guys are marketers, you understand. One million. That's crazy…”

“You need physical verification built into the system for agentic commerce.”

“We're offering half cash, half stock, and we have the ability to issue stock in order to get the deal done.”

“We had to make a tough call to put GameStop and a bunch of other companies on position closing only, which basically meant you couldn't open up new positions, take on more risk for a period of about one day.”

“GameStop was one of the collection of free, free stocks that was given to customers.”

“A lot of this stuff feels like conspiracy theories that it feels very similar to the Robin Hood, GameStop, Fiasco where there was like a lot of conspiracy theories about like Citadel purposely tanking markets and the bailing out hedge funds at various points. …”

“First of all, we never came close to going into business. That was just nonsense.”

“GameStop was, it, you know, it changed, it was the beginning of a change in the market structure and on the retail side, and so I knew we had to adapt to that.”

“Before I worked at Code Two, I was working at Melvin Capital. And so, you know, many of you guys probably heard of Melvin as the hedge fund that was short GameStop. And so I lived through this period where we went from, at the time, probably The best performin…”

“After GameStop, we took about a year off of short selling, and then I reengaged in short selling.”

“A board of directors that had perverse incentives, a management team that had perverse incentives.”

“The mainstream media thinks they know I'm running the business and they seem to have greater visibility into the business than I do. So everyone has an opinion as opposed to actually just focusing on the results. And in general, the news should just focus on t…”

“In twenty-twenty-one, there were 14, over 1400 people in corporate. Wow. Today, there's, like, 400 people.”

“SG&A has come down by, like, 50%”

“A fancy way of saying is that it's risk adjusted, and I don't want to lose money, and I want a situation where there's a good chance of making money and a really low chance of losing money, so it needs to be a pitch that is pretty much down the middle.”

“They can go from green to red, and they don't flash yellow. So when that happens, we'll be in a position.”

“I hired a bunch of fancy people from both Amazon and Chewy, and we expanded the catalog, and we added a bunch of product, and most of that product didn't sell, and we ended up marking it down and taking a big hit, and it cost shareholders a lot of money, becau…”

“We've gone from, like, 10% of our sales to over, close to a third, probably, for the full year is gonna come from collectibles”

“So, our ability to play in the digital world is limited.”

“There's a lot of money that's being spent, and we've taken a capex light approach, like a pretty risk light approach to the digital world.”

“So, there's no moonshots that are being done. Like, we're focused on real returns.”

“We're not investing in in, in virtual reality or in, in the metaverse, unless there's a clear path to being able to deliver results for shareholders.”

“I like reducing costs, so if it costs us less money than to report biannually, then by all means.”

“So it costs a lot of money to be a public company. We spend a lot of money on audit fees. So that hurt me at Chewy, that hurts me at GameStop. They charge us a lot of money.”

“Like, if we can make 80% margins but the upside is limited and it's not gonna move the needle, then I don't care. If it's able to translate into billions of dollars of shareholder value and it's scalable, then we're talking.”

“Powerpacks, physical and digital is very interesting. We can't get enough inventory, so.”

“So if we had a choice between physical and digital, because digital is more scalable, we're gonna go towards digital.”

“They don't come to us as often as you think, because they know, well they probably go to private equity or venture capital or these fancy hedge funds before they come to us, because I want to make sure that I'm I care about cash flow and the price that I pay, …”

“We want, I'll have a conversation with him that if he's focused on decades and centuries, not on making good luck.”

“People are buying these stocks generally for a very different reason than, you know a meme coin, for example, or even GameStop back in 2021. I think they legitimately believe that these are going to be like gigantic industries.”

“The user base was growing 50 to a hundred percent every month. And that compounds a lot when you do that for three years in a row, and so you're just really trying to, like, scale the platform”

“How fast did you hit maybe a million MAUs or whatever? Probably 18 months, two years. I mean, GameStop was a step change, right? So it was all around there. So yeah, call it those kind of 18 months.”

“GameStop was like, we doubled in 40 hours or something.”

“Cause I'd argue that in a lot of ways, AI and AGI is next to GameStop, the ultimate, it's a meme coin. It's a meme narrative for very rich people. It's like Silicon Valley, very rich people, venture capitalists, et cetera, needed a meme to pile a bunch of capi…”

“This is the lifeline for GameStop. And so basically I think that GameStop basically has to buy Mod Retro for a billion dollars. At least if I was an investor, that's my investment thesis.”

“Mod Retro actually has a partnership with GameStop.”

“So he's basically created, he's Intentionally turned him, turned MicroStrategy into a meme stock. Meaning, he's detached it from the underlying business in the way that GameStop did.”

“GameStop is a pretty bad GameStop.com is a pretty bad name. So game is good to have in the name. They sell games, although now they're selling like collectibles. So it's not perfect, but you want, you don't want to stop. You want to, you know, it should be gam…”

“Roaring Kitty, aka Keith Gill, Just disclosed a nine-figure position in GameStop.”

“GameStop finished the year, 20, 23 fiscal year, with Sales of 5.3 billion down from 5.9 billion the year before. So sales declined by 12% in the year. Adjusted EBITDA for the year was sixty five million dollars, and they have about 1.2 billion in cash.”

“12 and a half billion divided by sixty-five million of EBITDA means that this stock is currently trading at about a 192 times EBITDA.”

“That's the next cycle of this story. The next cycle of the story is where was the government?”

“The some of the cool stories are some of these creators like Logan Paul, they now have a billion dollar company with prime roaring kitty is the exact same thing, but instead of selling prime energy drinks or whatever, He's selling not financial advice, but he'…”

“GameStop stock currently 28 dollars as of recording this. If the stock hits 70 dollars a share, he's a billionaire.”

“He owns five million dollars of five million shares of GameStop, which is worth one hundred and fifteen million. And then he has sixty five million dollars worth of call options.”