It is a truth well established in my examination of the commercial world that the value of any offer is inseparable from the means by which it is to be discharged. A gentleman who presents himself at the counting-house of a great merchant and proposes to purchase the entire establishment for a sum that would embarrass several sovereign treasuries is not, on that account alone, to be received with uncritical admiration. The merchant is entirely justified in enquiring, before he removes so much as a ledger from the shelf, how precisely the funds are to be arranged.
Such is the situation presently before us. GameStop, a concern whose principal trade has long been the retail of entertainments played upon screens — and whose recent fame derives less from the prudence of its management than from the enthusiasm of a certain class of speculating public — has approached eBay, the great auction house of the digital age, with a proposal valued at $55,500,000,000. eBay has responded, not with celebration, but with a question that any factor of sound understanding would consider the natural first question: how is this to be paid?
That question has not, by the accounts available to this correspondent, received a satisfactory answer. And so the offer has been set aside.
I remarked in The Wealth of Nations that the division of labour, and the accumulation of stock, are the twin engines of national opulence. What I perhaps did not sufficiently anticipate was the emergence of a commercial climate in which stock — not the productive capital of manufactures, but the paper representation of expectation — might be accumulated to such apparent magnitude that a firm of modest and declining revenues could, with a tolerably straight countenance, propose to acquire one very nearly twenty times its own annual earnings. The arithmetic is, I confess, bracing.
eBay, for its part, has conducted itself with the restraint that The Theory of Moral Sentiments would prescribe for any party confronted with flattery that outpaces plausibility. The impartial spectator, observing from without, might note only that a handsome number, set upon an uncertain foundation, remains — for all its grandeur — a number that has not yet been paid.