GameStop has crafted a takeover bid where it can win even if it loses the deal.

On Sunday, the video game retailer turned meme stock made an unsolicited, non-binding offer to buy eBay for $125 per share. Ebay’s stock currently trades at $109, up 5% since Friday. The deal would be funded half in cash, it says TD Bank would provide up to $20 billion in debt, and half in GameStop stock. GameStop’s billionaire CEO Ryan Cohen has already threatened a proxy fight if eBay rejects the offer.

There’s just one obvious hold-up: the proposal values eBay at $55 billion while GameStop’s market capitalization is now less than $11 billion after the shares dropped 7% on Monday. Such lopsided deals are rare. Over the past five years, 187 U.S. public-to-public transactions over $1 billion closed, according to FactSet data. In those deals, the median buyer was five times larger (in terms of market capitalization) than the target company. GameStop’s offer for eBay flips that math on its head.

That may be beside the point.

GameStop has wrapped an options trade inside a takeover bid. On Monday, the company filed a Schedule 13D with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. That’s the disclosure investors have to make when they cross the 5% ownership threshold and may try to influence a company. The filing shows GameStop owns just 25,000 shares of eBay outright, a stake worth only a few million dollars. Instead, most of the exposure comes from derivatives. GameStop disclosed call options tied to more than 22 million shares of eBay stock. And those positions can be settled in cash instead of stock.

There’s nothing unusual about building a stake before a takeover bid. But, building that position with mostly derivatives is almost unheard of. One study of Schedule 13D filings shows that activists rely exclusively on stock in 97% of cases.

Options offer two advantages here. They’re cheaper than buying the shares outright, so you can control a much bigger position with less money and they offer more upside if the stock moves quickly. The trade-off is time. Options expire. In the 13D, GameStop says its puts and calls have a February 23, 2028 expiry date. You need something—like an unsolicited takeover bid—to happen before that deadline.

That’s where GameStop’s offer starts to make sense. If you announce a takeover at a premium, the target’s stock usually goes up. If the stock goes up, call options go up even more. And if those options can be settled in cash, you don’t need to actually buy the company to get paid. You can just close out the trade.

Offers like this aren’t off-limits, but they do tend to get a closer look. This one comes with baggage. GameStop and CEO Ryan Cohen are tied to the meme-stock era. Add the size gap and fuzzy financing, and it reads less like a straightforward acquisition and more like something eBay can brush aside, but regulators might read twice.

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