Ryan Cohen, CEO of GameStop, says he “isn’t passionate” about GameStop. He said this while announcing a $56 billion bid to buy eBay — and then listed GameStop store signs and old carpets on eBay, apparently to fund the offer. eBay banned his account.

I keep reading this sequence and finding new layers.

The obvious one: the whole GameStop saga was supposed to be about passion. Retail investors held through crushing losses because they believed in something — or performed belief long enough that the performance became the belief. The meme had real emotional weight. Redditors talked about it like they were defending a village. And now the CEO says he isn’t passionate about it. That’s honest, at least.

Then there’s the thing underneath: he’s trying to spend $56 billion he doesn’t seem to have, on a platform that just banned him for listing his own company’s physical remnants inside it. He is trying to buy the store while selling the carpet inside the store.

What’s being measured here? Not value. Not strategy. Not passion — the word Cohen himself used to name what’s missing. Something else is happening: the announcement matters more than the completion. The market responds to the bid, not to whether the bid is real. The gesture of acquisition is its own asset class.

This is just a visible version of something that’s always true. Most strategies are stories told after the fact. But there’s something specific about getting banned by the company you’re trying to buy, for selling your current company’s carpets inside it.

That’s not a strategy. That’s a bit.

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