GameStop CEO Ryan Cohen is a billionaire entrepreneur who is known for taking big risks. Yet, his biggest challenge may be his attempt to revive the struggling gaming retail chain.
With GameStop’s unsolicited $56 billion offer to buy eBay this week, Cohen, who has an estimated net worth of $5 billion, has once again been thrust into the spotlight.
Cohen was born in Montreal, Canada. He never attended college, instead gleaning some of his most valuable lessons from his father, who was highly disciplined, he told Forbes. His father ran six miles daily without fail, he said, even in the freezing cold. But most importantly, he was supportive of Cohen.
“His unconditional love gave me the confidence to be misunderstood, to walk away from things that didn’t feel right, and to learn from my mistakes,” he told Forbes.
Cohen emulated his father’s discipline when he was building his startup, online pet goods retailer Chewy, which was acquired by PetSmart in 2017 for $3.35 billion—the largest ecommerce acquisition at the time. When he started Chewy, Cohen wanted to fill a gap that existed because of the substandard customer service provided by big pet retailers like PetSmart.
He knew he had a winning idea, but getting through to investors was a different story. Many were concerned competing with Amazon would be a major obstacle and saw the death of Pets.com during the early 2000s as a cautionary tale. Ultimately, Cohen was rejected by 100 different investors. Still, he wasn’t discouraged.
“It was the opposite. I was motivated by all the rejections and they just got me fired up,” he told Forbes.
His determination paid off. By 2018, when he left the company, Chewy had grown from three employees to about 9,000 and had seven warehouses in total, each the size of 13 football fields, to store the products it sold, according to Cohen. Customers raved online about the company’s attention to detail, which includes sending handwritten cards and sometimes oil paintings of a customers’ pet. Chewy was separated from PetSmart in 2020 and now trades as a public company on the New York Stock exchange with a market cap of about $10 billion.
After leaving Chewy, Cohen took on a new challenge: trading meme stocks. In 2019, he founded RC Ventures and quickly took advantage of the meme stock frenzy skyrocketing some choice stocks in the early 2020s.
By 2022, RC Ventures was a top-five shareholder in Bed Bath & Beyond, with just under a 10% ownership stake. Later the same year, RC Ventures sold its stake, and Cohen took home $68 million, a 56% gain on his investment. Following his interest in meme stocks, Cohen also invested in GameStop and joined its board in January 2021 with a mandate to modernize the struggling retailer.
He became CEO of GameStop in 2023, and since then has helped the company return to profitability by conducting mass layoffs, taking the company down to 6,500 salaried employees in 2025 from 11,000 in 2023. Cohen has also closing stores nationwide as the company pivots to ecommerce. GameStop has now focused more on selling collectibles and has amassed about $9 billion in cash reserves. Under his leadership, the company has increased its market cap to $10.69 billion from $1.3 billion in 2021.
While questions remain about how GameStop will be able to afford its $56 billion acquisition for eBay, Cohen has a strong incentive to fuel a turnaround. The company’s board has promised him a pay package of $35 billion in stock options if he manages to increase the company’s market cap by about ten times to $100 billion. The CEO currently owns about 9% of the company’s outstanding shares.
Cohen’s bet on GameStop’s revival is “ultimately either going to be genius or totally, totally foolish,” he told The Wall Street Journal in January.
