GameStop Chief Executive Ryan Cohen said he was making an unsolicited offer to buy eBay for about $56 billion and saw a path to make the e-commerce company a much bigger competitor to Amazon.com.

Cohen told The Wall Street Journal that GameStop has built a roughly 5% stake in eBay and was offering $125 a share in cash and stock, a roughly 20% premium to its closing price on Friday.

"EBay should be worth -- and will be worth -- a lot more money," Cohen said in an interview. "I'm thinking about turning eBay into something worth hundreds of billions of dollars."

Cohen said he has a commitment letter from TD Bank to provide around $20 billion in debt financing to help make a deal possible.

If eBay isn't receptive to the proposal, Cohen said he was prepared to run a proxy fight and take his offer directly to shareholders. The window for shareholders to nominate director candidates at eBay ahead of an annual meeting scheduled for this June has already closed, according to the company's proxy materials.

GameStop is expected to make the details of its offer public later Sunday.

In the interview, Cohen said putting his videogame retailer and eBay under one roof could create huge opportunities to cut costs and improve earnings. The two companies share some overlap already, including a focus on selling collectibles such as trading cards.

"There is nobody who is more qualified, based on my experience, to run the eBay business," Cohen said, referencing his time at GameStop and previously Chewy, the online pet-products marketplace he co-founded.

The Wall Street Journal reported Friday evening that GameStop had been building an undisclosed stake in eBay and was preparing an offer.

EBay was valued at around $46 billion ahead of the Journal's report. Its shares shot up around 12% in after-hours trading on news of Cohen's potential offer.

GameStop is a much smaller company than eBay, valued at around $12 billion. That makes pulling off this sort of deal no easy feat.

GameStop has around $9 billion in cash on its balance sheet to put toward a deal. It wasn't immediately clear how it would come up with the rest of the money needed for a $56 billion acquisition. It is possible Cohen could tap outside investors, such as Middle Eastern sovereign-wealth funds, to back the deal, people familiar with the matter said.

Some Wall Street analysts are already skeptical that Cohen could pull off an acquisition. Investors have embraced eBay's focus on collectibles and other niche categories. "Why disrupt things? The turnaround is working," Bernstein analysts said about eBay in a note to clients.

Cohen built a big stake in GameStop in 2020 and criticized the company for moving too slowly toward e-commerce. He started gaining a cultlike following among retail traders online and proceeded to make a number of other activist bets, including at Bed Bath & Beyond.

GameStop gained fame during the meme-stock craze of 2021, in which individual traders bid up the retailer's stock. In 2023, the company named Cohen, who was already serving as chairman, as its new CEO.

Under Cohen's watch, GameStop has closed hundreds of stores and exited much of its international business. It has pivoted toward higher-margin items such as trading cards, retro games and consoles that strike a nostalgic chord with shoppers.

Cohen had told the Journal in January that he was scouting out big acquisition targets. He said he saw ways to integrate GameStop's bricks-and-mortar stores with eBay's online operations to help scale both companies.

The stores could become locations to collect and authenticate items from eBay sellers, for example, he said. He also said he believed eBay should be doing more around live commerce, where brands sell directly to shoppers via real-time video streams.

"It could be a legit competitor to Amazon," Cohen said about eBay.

EBay has already been taking steps to cut costs, with a strategy that includes embracing artificial-intelligence tools to help streamline its buying and selling processes. In February, the company said it would be culling about 6.5% of its global workforce, or roughly 800 employees.

Late last month, eBay reported strong first-quarter results and said that its gross merchandise volume -- or the total value of all paid transactions between users on its marketplace -- climbed 18% versus the prior-year period.

Smaller companies have pulled off much larger deals before. Paramount Skydance earlier this year emerged victorious in a bidding war for media Warner Bros. Discovery. Charter Communications struck a debt-fueled merger with the much bigger Time Warner Cable in 2015.

Cohen also has a potentially massive payday at stake if he can pull it all off. GameStop adjusted Cohen's compensation package at the beginning of the year to give him extra incentive to boost the company's market value and profitability. He stands to make as much as $35 billion in stock if certain criteria are met, including if its market value hits $100 billion, the Journal previously reported.

"I'm going to be as focused on eBay and as personally involved as I have been in the GameStop turnaround for the next few years," Cohen said.