for Game Stop, if they can pull it off. So much scrip, so little equity, so much debt. I doubt it will happen.

There was a time, about 2000 in the dot com bubble when analysts questioned why Yahoo!, which ran its own inefficient auction site at the time, didn't buy eBay. At the time Yahoo was about $125 as I recall, and eBay about $30. So they could have done a similar deal to the one today, buy eBay by issuing shares of their own inflated company. Yahoo! should have done it. Ten years later Yahoo! was $7 and eBay north of $40.

Buying a stodgy but profitable business with debt and equity you create is a good deal if you can pull it off. Imagine selling shares in your car so you can buy a new one. This is similar.

Which is still much better than shopping on Amazon for many things.

Used clothes and in the past, I would buy dug up flower bulbs from someone's yard. However, they can't compete against Amazon for new and legit products.

If GameStop's market value is $12 billion, and the offer is valued at $55 billion, how can it be "split evenly between cash and GameStop common stock"? If the combined value of the 2 companies is $67 billion, then GameStop can offer at most 18% in stock (if all the GameStop holders are willing to chuck their stock into the offer), and 82% would have to be cash - from some other source.

OK, after reflection and calculation, I can sort of see how this adds up - if the current combined value is reckoned to be 12+46=58, then giving the current eBay shareholders nearly $28 billion means they'd expect their remaining shares to be worth at least 46-28=18 billion, of the combined company now worth 12+46-28=30 billion. If GameStop holders reckon the value of their holding shouldn't go down, then that would leave exactly $18 billion for eBay shareholders to own of the combined company (so 60% of it goes to eBay owners, and 40% to GameStop holders).

But ... on further reflection, you still can't call that deal "split evenly". For that, it'd have to be "$27.75 billion in cash, and what you end up with is also worth $27.75 billion". So that would have to be $27.75 billion of what GameStop is claiming a combined value of 12+27.75=$39.75 bn. That would be 70% of the combined company.

But this implies the eBay owners would have to reckon GameStop executives - whose company nearly went under - would run eBay better than the current eBay executives. With GameStop, a struggling company (their revenue is decreasing), attached.