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Comment by boringg | Hacker News Reader

CNBC hard fumbled in that they didn't even understand what the offer was. The CEO put that on full display and embarrassed the hosts basic knowledge of finance. It was hard to watch.

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I have absolutely no clue how you could watch the interview and come away with this conclusion. The purpose of an interview is to ask Socratic questions to allow the guest to talk about something of which they have intimate knowledge.

The CEO made it seem like he himself didn't know how the math for the offer worked, and even when presented multiple opportunities to correct that impression, he made no attempt to convince anyone otherwise.

> I have absolutely no clue how you could watch the interview and come away with this conclusion.

The reason is pretty apparent. They are bagholders. People like this show up in every thread about Gamestop boasting about how amazing Cohen is in a weirdly personal manner, and have a very fantastical view of how things are going to go -- because their investment depends on it, and they built a literal cult around the idea that GME would make them rich, which necessitates viewing reality a little differently from the rest of us.

For more information, see Dan Olsen's "This is Financial Advice." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5pYeoZaoWrA Its a few years old, but gives you some perspective on the weird cult that has been built around GME.

Edit: Where Ryan Cohen comes in: https://youtu.be/5pYeoZaoWrA?t=6629

I imagine the actual reason why Cohen didn’t answer the question is that he would have to admit that if the combined entity issued enough shares to pay for the acquisition, it would substantially dilute existing shareholders.

I agree, but he had to know he'd be asked the question, right? And he had to know that staring blankly and mumbling about the offer being on the website wouldn't suffice as an explanation. It's just mind-boggling behavior from the CEO of a public company.

Yes you do. He came away with that conclusion because he entered with that conclusion. When you're already radicalized to a specific outcome, you lose the ability to perform the process of elimination.

In my defense, I had entirely forgotten GME is/was a meme stock. It's been many years since I spent brain cycles thinking about WSB.

Can you explain your thought process here? Perhaps we're "embarrassing my basic knowledge of finance", but I wasn't able to follow his math either.

The math doesn't actually math. Even if you're not discounting the cash on hand from GME's value all of GME's market value, plus their cash on hand, plus the "highly confident" $20B still doesn't add up to the take over value in Cohen's letter.

I know it doesn't. But I felt like parent commenter was offering to explain what CNBC and the rest of us didn't understand, that he does.

TLDR: half cash, half stock.

i t ' s o n t h e w e b s i t e . . .

What a bizarre interview that was. The least damaging interpretation is he was intentionally being bad to spite CNBC in a basically (though their explanation doesn't include this) childish fit for earlier bad coverage of GME.

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