The Wall Street Skinny

Send us Fan Mail
🚨 EMERGENCY EPISODE: GameStop just made an unsolicited $56 billion bid for eBay, and the math is NOT mathing. After watching CEO Ryan Cohen's bizarre live CNBC interview with Andrew Ross Sorkin (where he kept deflecting questions with answers like "it's on the website"), we hit *record* immediately to break this down.

Kristen, our resident investment banking, PE, and M&A expert, walks through why this deal defies the laws of physics:

The offer: $125/share, half cash, half stock — roughly $56bn total
GameStop's market cap: under $11bn
Cash needed: $28bn (GameStop has $9bn on hand + a "up to $20bn" TD Bank commitment letter)
Combined company leverage: ~10x EBITDA (a massive LBO is typically 7x — banks don't do 10x)
The $17bn equity hole: where is it actually coming from?

We compare this to the Paramount/Warner Bros deal (spoiler: that one works because Larry Ellison is bankrolling it), unpack GameStop's curious 5% derivative stake in eBay, and explore the theories floating around — CEO comp package triggers, a possible "uno reverse" play to get eBay to bid for GameStop instead, and echoes of the Porsche/Volkswagen hostile takeover.
Plus: Ryan Cohen's background, the dismissed Bed Bath & Beyond pump-and-dump lawsuit, and why no sovereign wealth fund has a strategic reason to write the check.

Got a theory on what's really going on? Drop it in the comments.

Want to learn how to actually run accretion/dilution analyses and tear deals apart like this? Check out our 35+ hour self-paced Investment Banking & Private Equity Fundamentals course, taught by Kristen.

https://thewallstreetskinny.com/premium-self-study/
Shop our Self Paced Courses:
Investment Banking & Private Equity Fundamentals HERE
Fixed Income Sales & Trading HERE
Subscribe to our Substack: https://substack.com/@thewallstreetskinny

Send us Fan Mail
Jerome Powell's term as Fed Chair ends May 15th, and his likely successor Kevin Warsh is poised to walk into the most fractured Fed since 1992. In this episode, we're breaking down what actually happened at Powell's final meeting, who the dissenters were and why, and what it tells us about the Fed Warsh is about to inherit.
But the bigger question we're wrestling with is this: what does Kevin Warsh actually want to do? He's been remarkably vocal for 20 years about his views on monetary policy, and his philosophy represents a real regime change — a more unified Fed, less hand-holding of markets, a smaller balance sheet, and a return to the Fed staying in its lane. We walk through who actually sits on the FOMC and how voting works, what quantitative easing really is and why we started doing it in the first place, the difference between monetary and fiscal policy (and why people keep confusing the two), and why "lower rates" doesn't mean the same thing to all people — including why a Warsh Fed could theoretically deliver a cut to the Fed funds rate alongside higher mortgage rates.
We also get into the so-called "Chairman's Curse" — the eerie pattern of catastrophe that has marked nearly every Fed chair transition in modern history — and what event-day risk around FOMC meetings might look like under a chair who wants to communicate less, not more. Plus: Powell's surprising decision to stay on as a governor and the uncomfortable question nobody wants to ask out loud — if we're never going to take our medicine on the deficit, what is the role of the Federal Reserve actually supposed to be?
Shop our Self Paced Courses:
Investment Banking & Private Equity Fundamentals HERE
Fixed Income Sales & Trading HERE
Subscribe to our Substack: https://substack.com/@thewallstreetskinny

Send us Fan Mail
In Part 3 of our Caesars Palace Coup series, we're back with Sujeet Indap of the Financial Times — co-author of the definitive book on the $30 billion LBO disaster — to connect the dots between 2008's creditor-on-creditor violence and the private credit tremors rattling markets right now. Caesars itself is back on the auction block, with Tilman Fertitta's Golden Nugget circling alongside a potential management buyout involving Tom Reeg and Carl Icahn. We dig into what a 2.0 deal would actually look like, why existing bondholders could get layered all over again, and how the Vici REIT spinoff reshaped the entire capital structure in ways most headlines completely miss when they quote the "$7 billion" offer price.
But the bigger story is what's happening across private credit broadly. In the last few weeks alone, Blue Owl permanently gated a perpetual fund, Blackstone partners had to backstop redemptions, and BlackRock, Cliffwater, and Apollo have all gated funds. We push Sujeet on the question every allocator is wrestling with: is this a contained correction or the early innings of something systemic? We get into why first-lien recoveries have collapsed, why loan-only capital structures and uni-tranche debt have changed what "senior secured" actually means, the PIK toggle canary that's quietly ticking up, and why the alt managers trading at 40x forward earnings may have priced in a growth story that's about to meet its first real credit cycle.
We also cover the fascinating bifurcation playing out in real time — record investment-grade issuance from Amazon, Honeywell, and others on one end, while BDCs gate retail investors on the other — and what it means for the push to get private credit into 401(k)s. Plus: the $80 million Wachtell-to-Kirkland lawyer poaching that Sujeet wrote about and why it might be the most underrated leading indicator of the next debt crisis. 

Shop our Self Paced Courses:
Investment Banking & Private Equity Fundamentals HERE
Fixed Income Sales & Trading HERE
Subscribe to our Substack: https://substack.com/@thewallstreetskinny

Send us Fan Mail
In Part 3 of our Caesars Palace Coup series, we're back with Sujeet Indap of the Financial Times — co-author of the definitive book on the $30 billion LBO disaster — to connect the dots between 2008's creditor-on-creditor violence and the private credit tremors rattling markets right now. Caesars itself is back on the auction block, with Tilman Fertitta's Golden Nugget circling alongside a potential management buyout involving Tom Reeg and Carl Icahn. We dig into what a 2.0 deal would actually look like, why existing bondholders could get layered all over again, and how the Vici REIT spinoff reshaped the entire capital structure in ways most headlines completely miss when they quote the "$7 billion" offer price.
But the bigger story is what's happening across private credit broadly. In the last few weeks alone, Blue Owl permanently gated a perpetual fund, Blackstone partners had to backstop redemptions, and BlackRock, Cliffwater, and Apollo have all gated funds. We push Sujeet on the question every allocator is wrestling with: is this a contained correction or the early innings of something systemic? We get into why first-lien recoveries have collapsed, why loan-only capital structures and uni-tranche debt have changed what "senior secured" actually means, the PIK toggle canary that's quietly ticking up, and why the alt managers trading at 40x forward earnings may have priced in a growth story that's about to meet its first real credit cycle.
We also cover the fascinating bifurcation playing out in real time — record investment-grade issuance from Amazon, Honeywell, and others on one end, while BDCs gate retail investors on the other — and what it means for the push to get private credit into 401(k)s. Plus: the $80 million Wachtell-to-Kirkland lawyer poaching that Sujeet wrote about and why it might be the most underrated leading indicator of the next debt crisis. 

For a 14 day FREE Trial of Macabacus, click HERE
Shop our Self Paced Courses:
Investment Banking & Private Equity Fundamentals HERE
Fixed Income Sales & Trading HERE
Subscribe to our Substack: https://substack.com/@thewallstreetskinny

Send us Fan Mail
This is Part II of our Caesars Palace deep dive, and honestly, this is where things get truly unhinged. If Part I was the setup — the $30 billion LBO, the financial crisis, and the private equity firms scrambling to keep the lights on — this episode is the masterclass in what happens when the knives come out. We're breaking down the mechanics of distressed debt investing, restructuring, and bankruptcy. Above all, we'll explain how Apollo essentially invented a new playbook for stripping creditor rights that the entire industry now uses as standard operating procedure. 

How do you move billions in assets out of a dying company and into a clean entity without the creditors being able to stop you? Who determines the value of what's being transferred when nobody is representing the other side? And how does Britney Spears end up at the literal center of a multibillion-dollar restructuring that kept this whole thing alive way longer than it should have survived?

And the biggest question of all (why we think this episode is mandatory listening right now): what happens when this playbook gets deployed AGAIN, today? We're already seeing the early signs: record levels of corporate debt coming due, earnings getting squeezed by higher rates, and redemption requests piling up. So what does creditor-on-creditor violence actually look like in practice? How do the alliances form and break? Why did the investors who got screwed the hardest in the Caesars saga end up being the biggest winners by the time the dust settled? And if you're sitting in any kind of debt instrument right now, how do you know whether you're the one holding the cards or the one about to get shut out in the cold?

Stay tuned for Part III, the conclusion of this 3-part series, where we'll be interviewing author and Financial Times reporter Sujeet Indap!
Shop our Self Paced Courses:
Investment Banking & Private Equity Fundamentals HERE
Fixed Income Sales & Trading HERE
Subscribe to our Substack: https://substack.com/@thewallstreetskinny