I thought gamestop was in financial trouble a few years back, how can they afford 56 billion?
They can't afford $56 billion - the proposed acquisition was going to be halfway paid for in stock and halfway via a loan. (Though, they also can't afford $28B in stock - the entire company is only worth $10B - so the idea was going to be to pay for it by issuing new shares of the merged GameStop-Ebay entity, after the deal was signed.)
If that sounds audacious, it's because it is - as far as I've seen, most analysts were not expecting this deal to be taken seriously, and many are calling it a publicity stunt.
They propose to borrow $20bn, twice their market cap, to buy a company worth five times their market cap. And 50% of it would be in Gamestop shares, which would be insane for eBay investors to accept. Yes the combined company would now own eBay, but would have the massive baggage of Gamestop's dwindling business plus $20bn of extra debt - a recipe for collapse.
There's no upside for eBay's shareholders, even if Gamestop was capable of pulling off the transaction, which is extremely unlikely even if eBay was crazy enough to be willing to accept it.