Was Ryan Cohen’s Baffling GameStop-eBay Interview Actually Strategic?

What if the awkwardness was the strategy?

That’s the question hanging over Ryan Cohen’s now-viral CNBC appearance after GameStop stunned Wall Street with an unsolicited $55.5 billion bid for eBay — a company worth roughly four times GameStop’s own market value.

Cohen, the GameStop CEO once described as “the unpredictable king of the meme-stock era,” went on Squawk Box on Monday to defend the moonshot deal. Instead, he delivered an interview that left investors, analysts and even the anchors looking befuddled.

To many viewers, it looked like a communications train wreck. The fallout was immediate. “Big Short” investor Michael Burry sold his position in the videogame retailer after the company’s audacious bid, adding another layer of scrutiny to Cohen’s puzzling media appearance.

Steve Soltis is a lecturer and communications expert at UVA’s Darden School of Business. (Photo by Caroline Mackey, Darden School of Business)

On the surface, the interview looked like a self-inflicted disaster. But some crisis communications experts think that interpretation may be too simple.

After all, Cohen is not an inexperienced founder who stumbled into the spotlight. Before GameStop, he built Chewy into a multibillion-dollar company and sold it to PetSmart for $3.35 billion in 2017.

Which raises the obvious question: was this really a lack of preparation and a communications blunder? Or was Cohen manipulating the media in plain sight?

The Darden Report caught up with lecturer and communications expert Steve Soltis to unpack what happened. Soltis previously led executive communications at The Coca-Cola Company and is co-founder of Arvo Advisory and the Darden Leadership Communication Council at the University of Virginia Darden School of Business.

Q: Could a CEO intentionally appear uninformed during a major acquisition interview to shape investor psychology or market reaction?

Soltis: While I would never encourage a CEO to be intentionally uninformed in any kind of stakeholder engagement, there was clearly a counter-intuitive, and you might even say Machiavellian genius angle to Cohen’s performance. He earned the moniker “the Meme King” for a reason. There is so much pent-up distrust and dislike of traditional media these days, including financial media.

We’ll know more about GameStop’s valuation in a week or so. He may be playing a longer game here.

Q: Given Cohen’s track record at Chewy, should this awkward media performance be viewed as potentially calculated?

Soltis: Cohen is no dummy. This felt almost too obviously calculated to me. Part of that likely stemmed from his dislike of traditional financial media, who were never really high on GameStop in the first place. We’ll see where the deal goes.

There was a lot of gasping over the stock dropping 10 percent after the Squawk Box appearance, which is such an obvious reaction. You might remember people had similar reactions and doomsday scenarios when Elon Musk was leading DOGE and Tesla stock was taking a beating. Well, last I checked, that stock is up over 70 percent since then. We can debate the reputational damage, but the valuation is up.

Q: Have elite founders used confusion, understatement or misdirection to manipulate media narratives and strengthen their position during major deals?

Soltis: Absolutely. Understatement and head fakes are not just the stuff of sexy TV shows like “Succession.” It happens all the time. Having said that, there is a fine line between misdirection and deceit, which never has a place in business.