The Ledger, every show

“What really happened at Twitter was that the advertisers, you know, I don't know what the situation is now, but they pretty much conspired against him, and, you know, it had nothing to do, my understanding is it really had nothing to do with the cost cuts, mor…”

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

“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.”

“They're spending five and a half billion dollars on operating expenses on eleven billion dollar business that Has no inventory in its asset lights. So, it just, there's 11 and a half thousand employees, and it doesn't make sense.”

“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.”

“When I think about the MetaQuest, I mean, it's a joke.”

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

“If our suppliers are sending us gifts in the mail, that's a really bad sign. It means we're overpaying. If our suppliers are telling us they never want to speak to us again, it means we're getting the right price.”

“EBay could have been Amazon.”

“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 and 2.4 billion spent on sales and marketin…”

“But if you look at in-game digital items, there's no marketplace that is providing liquidity for them. And so I would use eBay to provide liquidity for in-game digital items. And I believe that addressable market is significantly larger than could be much larg…”

“It's over a hundred million bucks.”

“EBay has a hundred and thirty million users and they're getting crushed by competitors in live commerce.”

“The goal here isn't to be an activist. The goal is I want to own eBay. I want to run eBay. Like, I want that to be my baby.”

“EBay is like Chewy on steroids. And so there's so much more runway, and it's global.”

“When I think about what eBay could be worth, if I'm running this business, I believe it's a heck of a lot more than a 125 dollars a share.”

“You know, the directors board of directors make four million dollars. It's like 350 to 450,000 per director. There's been no insider buying at the company.”

“I reached out to eBay, like, I don't know, maybe a year or two years ago to talk to them about partnering, and They didn't engage seriously.”

“Ultimately, what you see is that when people don't have their own money on the line, they don't give a shit, and they're focused on all kinds of other stuff that ultimately doesn't matter to shareholders”

“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…”

“One thing I know for certain is that the CEOs, if they can reduce their cost structure in the short term, They're gonna replace, they're gonna take computers over humans.”

“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.”

“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.”

“The strategics can't really do it because I don't think that they would be able to clear antitrust. So any of the large competitors wouldn't be able to acquire it.”

“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.”

“And so like you look at the usability of the platform and the teams, the engineering teams are much smaller and they're innovating a lot faster.”

“You know, I think that eBay is the kind of business where the future of the business model is more certain than most tech businesses, and that's why it's done so well. And, you know, there's been such a lack of innovation, yet it hasn't been able to be disrupt…”

“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.”

“Well I haven't done the math, but if things go correctly, then it better be the majority. Otherwise I'm wasting my time.”

“In terms of the digital marketplace, and they are already doing it to a certain extent. I mean, like, all kinds of Roblox digital items are bought and sold, but and I've actually bought them for my kids, and there's so much fraud on the platform. Like, we're b…”

“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.”

“People build teams, they hire people, ultimately what that means is they delegate their work to someone else, you end up taking on this crazy cost structure, and it works when the business is growing, but it doesn't work well once you the business stops growin…”

“That's a different calculus than the world of private equity, or venture capital, or any money managers, where They're incentivized to deploy capital because they get management fees.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“It's definitely gonna benefit the few that are invested in the industry, but there's gonna be a lot of people that are not gonna benefit from artificial intelligence, so.”

“Everyone has perverse incentives, so someone who's in the AI industry is going to tell us how AI is the best thing since sliced bread”

“It's governments and it's ones who are, who have a long tenure. You look at America, You know, the presidential cycle is four years. So, I don't know if that's necessarily long-term incentives.”

“Social media. Is one of the worst things to happen to humanity.”

“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.”

“It could have been a five hundred million dollar business. It could have been a hundred million dollar business. It could have been profitable if we would have spent a lot less money on marketing, but life is too short to do it small.”

“I mean, if you just look at how they've done in the past since COVID, Every important metric is down. GMV is down. Active users is down by thirty million.”