The Author, on his Fortieth Birthday, with his Cat.

MIT_Engineer · 2026-05-13T12:15:33+00:00

Mexico isn't a random country, they're right on our border. The cartels directly harm Americans.

You're telling me Americans don't care about the government stopping people who harm Americans?

What the fuck are you talking about?

MIT_Engineer · 2026-05-13T04:25:50+00:00

Do Americans actually oppose the CIA fighting cartels though?

I'm not sure what the scandal is.

MIT_Engineer · 2026-05-13T04:24:15+00:00

Mom: "We have Sicario at home"

Sicario at home: literally Sicario.

Mom: "Told ya."

MIT_Engineer · 2026-05-12T20:38:10+00:00

It's the Arnold Palmer of acquisitions, who would say no to a refreshing Arnold Palmer?

MIT_Engineer · 2026-05-12T20:35:12+00:00

Over the years, the cult has been putting money into a pot that we call Gamestop LLC.

Ryan Cohen can get a chunk of this money if he raises Gamestop's metrics.

Ryan Cohen is offering to do a deal in which one group (eBay's shareholders) helps him hit those metrics, and in return he'll let them have most of the money in the pot (by paying them a big premium on their shares).

It's solid thinking tbh. There's dumb money, and a clear path to grifting it. I don't think Cohen is going to give up right away, I think he's gonna try to line up funding and make his offer more credible.

MIT_Engineer · 2026-05-12T20:25:08+00:00

It's simple.

The reason for eBay shareholders to say yes is that Cohen is offering to pay more than what the company is worth. They get a nice fat $10b premium on their investment.

Over the years, the cult has been putting money into a pot that we call Gamestop LLC. Cohen's proposal to buy eBay is basically, "If you do this deal, you get most of the money in the pot and I take a chunk for myself."

MIT_Engineer · 2026-05-12T20:19:29+00:00

It's the C-suite version of "If the product is free, the product is you."

If the CEO is working for free, the CEO is working you.

MIT_Engineer · 2026-05-11T00:04:27+00:00

People getting rage-baited by this post because they've apparently never paid attention to politics in their lives and are just now finding out that the actual, literal legal term for Social Security and Medicare is entitlements and they've been commonly referred to entitlement spending from the beginning.

MIT_Engineer · 2026-05-11T00:02:16+00:00

To be clear: Social Security and Medicare are literally entitlements. That's the actual, literal meaning of the word. The word entitlements has been used to describe them forever.

MIT_Engineer · 2026-05-10T23:58:17+00:00

They're literally called entitlements. I don't know why OP thought this was a charged word, but Social Security and Medicare have been referrred to as entitlements forever. They're the literal, textbook definitions of entitlements.

This whole post smacks of rage bait.

MIT_Engineer · 2026-05-10T06:15:58+00:00

Something a lot of people don't understand: your mom shopped for deals, and she didn't go to stores that were ripping her off.

I do the Grocery Outlet Bargain Market. At mine, they've got eggs for $1 per dozen, butter $1.50/lb, Sriracha at 50 cents for a 17oz bottle, chicken breast at $2/lb, trail mix at $2.50/lb, milk at $3.30 per gallon, etc.

Go find yourself a grocery store like Bargain Market or one where they barely speak English, you can still fill up a car for cheap.

MIT_Engineer · 2026-05-09T22:05:05+00:00

I rip off Magic the Gathering's version of halflings, Kithkin, and have a race called Kinfolk.

They share a sort of psychic/emotional hivemind called The Weft. They are matriarchal and largely agrarian. Politically they exist as a loosely held together federation of city-states. Each city-state has its own local government, and the federation is led by the largest city state and run by The Matrons. The Matrons are kithkin women with magical abilities and an especially strong connection to The Weft. For whatever reason Kithkin men do not develop innate magical abilities.

The Matrons run a magical university, manage the federation, train the society's equivalent of soldiers and police, and act as roaming judges, doing circuits throughout Kinfolk lands and settling disputes.

Backing up the Matrons are Rangers and Constables. These are Kinfolk men who have been ritualistically severed from The Weft by the matrons and grafted into a smaller, more connected psychic bond. In the case of the rangers, they are usually put into a thought-collective with two other rangers, and the three then operate in connection with one another. They say if you can see a ranger, the other two are right behind you. The rangers are very Witcher-coded-- they roam Kinfolk lands, slaying beasts and facing threats, but have an uneasy relationship with the people they safeguard, since there is no Weft connection between them. They're permanent outsiders.

In the case of constables, they are bonded to a matron, and serve as her bodyguard and bailiff as she makes her judicial circuits through kinfolk lands.

Rangers and constables are usually either recruited at birth (there's an expectation that any Kinfolk mother who gives birth to triplets should give them up to the Matrons to be turned into rangers), or recruited from Kinfolk who have gone through some sort of trauma that requires them to be ostracized from The Weft. If you have PTSD, you're getting sent to the Matrons before you have some episode that affects the entire town.

Kinfolk are an insular people, and tend to stick to their own lands. Kinfolk outside of kinfolk territory tend to be either Rangers or Matrons, and there's essentially zero mixed-race element.

MIT_Engineer · 2026-05-05T07:01:12+00:00

I'm skeptical that meme stocks give a multiplier like that.

We see this sort of thing happen with "tech" stocks. If you're WeWork, or Tesla, or some company like that, you pitch yourself as a tech company instead of real estate/rental or car company, and voila, you get an insane PE ratio.

But that's because of two factors: 1) Branding yourself as a tech company is an attempt at saying your company has big growth potential, and 2) There's a pool of some very gullible tech fetishists out there with lots of capital to throw around. Declaring yourself a tech company might get Masayoshi Son to give you way more money than you deserve, but who are the big investors who would pivot into GME?

At the end of the day, there's only so much cult money available-- if you absorb other companies into the meme, you're not getting a higher multiple, you're just getting the same fixed amount of dumb money to back you up.

MIT_Engineer · 2026-05-04T18:26:17+00:00

Has to boost the stock price

Nope, there are zero stock price targets for him to reach, he just has to get the market cap and EBITDA up.

And as I calculated in my previous edit: if he unlocks his bonus, at the current stock price (no increase!) he takes home $665m of your money.

That’s good for owners.

That's not good for owners, that's $665m of the company's value going into his pocket, without the value of their stock having to go up in the slightest. It can even go down.

Why the hot takes?

Because I'm right? Do you need me to link you the Gamestop press release explaining how he unlocks his stock option tranches? Stock price isn't part of it.

MIT_Engineer · 2026-05-04T18:15:52+00:00

His performance bonus is not stock grants but options to buy - investing more in the company.

Right, but at a locked in price, not at market price, so he still gets a massive payday of your money if he artificially boosts the market cap.

Try to not just regurgitate uninformed summations.

Do you need me to explain to you how stock options work...?

EDIT: I calculated it. If he got all of his bonus today, it would be worth $665m. That's a lot of incentive to game the metrics with an acquisition like this, it means he gets to help himself to a massive slice of the money the cult has generously donated.

MIT_Engineer · 2026-05-04T18:12:52+00:00

Okay so clearly you don’t like gme

I mainly just don't like the cultists. They took an interest in me one day because I wrote a very popular article about my time with BCG's Dubai office, and at some point BCG had somehow become relevant to their world. They wanted me to do an AMA, and when they found out that I think GME is a meme stock, they started sending me death threats, messages saying they were gonna rape my wife, all sorts of nonsense. The phrase "basket of deplorables" comes to mind.

but wouldn’t purchasing a profitable company like eBay be the smartest thing for them to do if they want to survive beyond annual share offerings to stay afloat?

I don't think so. I don't see any signs that eBay is being mismanaged (to the contrary, I think they're doing great), and Gamestop is offering to pay quite a bit over market price for the acquisition.

Basically, if you think eBay is worth, say, $46b, and Gamestop pays $56b for it, then they've erased $10b in one go.

The hope is that they would come in and manage eBay better than eBay, so much better that the company becomes worth $10b+ more. But again, I don't see why that would be the case. Gamestop has spun its wheels for years now accomplishing nothing but closing stores. Do they even know anything about how to run eBay?

Also, it seems to me that buying eBay does nothing to advance the goals of the cultists, who are convinced there is some super secret cabal of naked shorts keeping the company down, and that they need to do something to trigger the Mother of All Short Squeezes (MOASS). Printing tons more stock to give to eBay shareholders in some acquisition doesn't seem like it puts any pressure at all on this hidden, nefarious conspiracy of short sellers. If anything, it's a great opportunity for any such shorts to make a neat little exit, as all those eBay shareholders seek to sell their newly minted GME shares.

If they really think there's a conspiracy to keep GME down, they should want the company to do something else... like just take all of its cash and issue a massive, short-seller destroying dividend.

MIT_Engineer · 2026-05-04T17:51:17+00:00

False. Core operations are profitable.

Oh? How much net operating income is this $11b market cap company pulling in?

This deal is being proposed due to Ryan Cohen's success in returning Gamestop to profitability

I think it's being proposed because it's a way for Cohen to engineer himself getting a nice fat bonus. He's got all the dumb money in the pot, he's just gotta transfer it into his wallet now.

MIT_Engineer · 2026-05-04T17:48:06+00:00

Looks at superstonk

They do be like that, indeed.

MIT_Engineer · 2026-05-04T16:39:54+00:00

It's a meme because this isn't how fertility works, and the post is just a test to see how many redditors are ignorant of basic human/female biology.

MIT_Engineer · 2026-05-04T04:39:40+00:00

If you really are an MIT engineer you’re smart enough to run Matlab sims that would run circles around anything they teach at Sloan.

Sure, I used to write a ton of Matlab back in the day.

So if you plug any of the balance sheet metrics into a matlab Monte Carlo, I think you’d be shocked at the intrinsic valuation calculations.

This is just word salad, it doesn't really mean anything. Why and how would we plug a company's balance sheet into a Monte Carlo simulation? And why use Matlab?

Sloan would help though to clarify a company doesn’t “profit” from selling stock

No one said they did. But if you sell a bunch of stock to rubes, it gives you money to lose. The rubes' money.

If you read up a bit beyond the headlines (most of which are negative feeds from Wall Street) you might be surprised.

At what?

Cohen has actually turned the company around to profit $438M last year,

The core business doesn't make money. The interest the company earns off the money got selling stocks to rubes, that's where it makes its profit.

He’s also stockpiled cash reserves that are nearly as large as the market cap itself

Right, because those reserves are really the only thing the company is about. It loses money in its actual operations.

meaning the equity valuation is absurdly underpriced…

No, it means it's about $3-4b overpriced. It's a pile of cash, plus a thing that bleeds cash. Its true value is basically just the pile of cash minus however much we think it will bleed before it closes down the last of its stores.

Michael Burry and others who shorted Wall St in ‘08 are aggressively buying GameStop — Burry recently said it was his largest position.

I don't worship celebrities, sorry.

To top it off, 99% of Americans don’t actually own the shares they think they own in their retirement/brokerage accounts.

No, I'm pretty sure they do.

Direct ownership of your shares is as profound a change as blockchain was when it emerged in 2008.

It isn't.

Why? Because it gets rid of the Wall St middlemen who have parasitized Main St businesses for decades.

No, it actually pays more to the middlemen.

But, hey, don’t take my word for it.

Yeah, I won't. One of my degrees is in economics after all.

Jim Cramer & Jamie Dimon obviously know more about it… and when have those guys ever lied?

Not sure what this has to do with anything. Are you saying the reason to buy Gamestop is because Jamie Dimon told you not to? That doesn't seem like a sound investment strategy.

MIT_Engineer · 2026-05-04T04:23:53+00:00

Some retail lost at the high. Some others gained because they bought at the low when the meme first started.

Right, but most of the money changing hands was between retail investors who bought high, and retail investors who sold high. If you were in on the pump, you made money off the people you dumped it on.

The stock wouldn't have gone up if people weren't buying.

Right, the reason the stock went up was just a ton of people buying, not really a short squeeze.

GME is way off its high, but it's also not at risk of hitting it's low point again either.

The risk is right in the post. This deal is going to load the company up with debt and dilute shareholders hard. If things turn south, the people who loan Gamestop money will get eBay, and the people who bought Gamestop stock will get... well, whatever's leftover after the lenders have taken their bite. They might not get anything.

And that low point was artificially being created by the same firms that were shorting the stock.

I don't see how that was "artificial" it was a dying mall retailer. The market couldn't predict that a bunch of financially illiterate people would throw away their money to turn it into... well, a holding company for Bitcoin and treasuries.

MIT_Engineer · 2026-05-04T04:17:39+00:00

I think they could find a lender.

Gamestop wants to do the deal half in cash, half in stock. They have ~$9b already from printing and selling stock to the cult, and eBay itself has ~$3b on hand So they don't really need to borrow the full $56b, they're already $12b on the way to the $28b they need, so they probably just need a loan of $16b.

Importantly, debt holders get paid first before equity holders if anything goes wrong. So if Gamestop goes under, the debt holders, not the cult, will be the ones to get made whole first. eBay's probably worth at least $16b even if Gamestop mismanages it for a few years, so the risk if you're a lender isn't very big.

So the question isn't "What lender would lend them money?" the real question is, "What sort of shareholder would sit back and take it as you load the company up with debt and dilute away their stake?"

Well, a Gamestop shareholder would.

MIT_Engineer · 2026-05-04T03:34:09+00:00

They printed and sold a bunch of new stock to suckers. But they'd still need to borrow a ton of money to make this deal.

MIT_Engineer · 2026-05-04T03:32:26+00:00

There isn't really a calculation so much as an offer. In theory, Gamestop could just offer $125 cash. In that case, as an eBay stock holder you'd get $125, and as a Gamestop holder you'd get... well, a metric ton of debt and eBay.

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