If you send traffic to some e-commerce platform through an affiliate link, you are the one who gets paid. These companies are instead trying to rig the system in such a way that the affiliate would be forced to pay them. It's an absurd and desperate proposal that deserves to be rejected.

What's more, this deal is completely unattractive from the POV of the Ebay shareholders, because they basically get three things: 1) Ebay takes on debt to pay out $62.50 per share in cash, 2) They own Gamestop, 3) Cohen becomes CEO of Ebay. The first thing they could easily do on their down. The second thing they could also do, but Gamestop's actual business is close to worthless. The third thing would replace Ebay's successful management with a guy who has barely done anything in five years of running his current company.

The only one who wins here is Cohen, because he gets a new job, and the transaction would most likely count towards the market cap milestone in his current moonshot pay package that he has no way of achieving otherwise.

Similarly, his strategic initiatives at Gamestop have all been failure (e-commerce push, NFTs, digital games platform, crypto investments, ...). The only thing that has worked is aggressively cutting costs, mainly by shutting down stores, which was a plan that had already been proposed by BCG before Cohen came onboard.

Basically, he has done nothing except for taking credit for a plan that was already in motion and repeatedly diluting shareholders to raise funds that have been sitting in T-Bills ever since. There is no indication whatsoever that this guy is some kind of business genius who would be able to run Ebay better than the current management - quite the opposite actually.

Buying EBAY would be a bad deal for pretty much everyone involved. GME shareholders get diluted to buy EBAY for way too much money. EBAY shareholders get paid in vastly overvalued GME shares. And the entire thing would be managed by some guy whose only strategic idea is to cut costs. The only one who would benefit is Cohen, because it would create a sufficiently liquid market for him to sell his stake, something that is not currently possible in GME.

Yet, they are still around, they are still deeply embedded in most businesses, and no matter how much they screw up, it just keeps going.

Because LLMs are inherently designed to interface with humans through natural language. Trying to graft a machine interface on top of that is simply the wrong approach, because it is needlessly computationally inefficient, as machine-to-machine communication does not - and should not - happen through natural language.

The better question is how to design a machine interface for communicating with these models. Or maybe how to design a new class of model that is equally powerful but that is designed as machine first. That could also potentially solve a lot of the current bottlenecks with the availability of computer resources.

I think they are in serious trouble, especially with the size of their cash burn. Their planned IPO could easily turn out to be their WeWork moment where the bottom suddenly falls out on the valuation if they cannot make their operation look more like a real business before investors lose confidence.