GameStop CEO Ryan Cohen attacks parasitic corporate bureaucracy
Burry compares him to Buffett, Consultants and directors get named as risk-free insiders
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GameStop CEO Ryan Cohen has published what amounts to a shareholder-letter-as-flamethrower, aimed not at competitors but at the professional class inside the firm.
According to Business Insider, Cohen posted a lengthy message on X titled “The Hollow Men,” denouncing a “new, parasitic class of corporate bureaucrat: The Risk-Free Insider.” His targets were familiar: independent directors who “don’t dare rock the boat,” executives insulated by bonuses and golden parachutes, and managers who outsource accountability to expensive consultants.
Cohen’s argument is blunt in instinct if not in tone: incentives matter, and the modern corporation has become a machine for separating decision-making from consequences. When upside is privatized through stock-based pay and downside is socialized through severance packages, “management” becomes less a function than a rent stream.
Business Insider notes Cohen called these groups the “hollow men of the boardroom,” polished in wardrobe and buzzwords but short on “skin in the game.” His prescription is an “owner’s mentality,” where leaders treat shareholder capital as their own and suffer proportionally when they do something dumb.
That framing is not new—Warren Buffett has been making variations of it for decades—but Cohen is reviving it in a moment when corporate America has perfected the art of managerial self-protection. Buffett famously mocked the incentive structure of “independent” directors in a 2019 letter, writing that CEOs don’t seek “pit bulls” for boards; “it’s the cocker spaniel that gets taken home.” He also quipped he was the “Typhoid Mary of compensation committees,” a man so unfashionably skeptical of pay packages that he was rarely invited.
Cohen’s post drew an approving signal from Michael Burry, the investor made famous by “The Big Short.” Burry shared it and wrote that Cohen has “rougher edges than Buffett,” but is “more modern in approach,” per Business Insider. Burry has also been floating the analogy that Cohen could remake GameStop through acquisitions the way Buffett transformed Berkshire Hathaway from a textile mill into a conglomerate.
The interesting part isn’t whether Cohen is right about consultants—everyone who’s ever sat through a ‘transformation’ deck already knows. It’s whether he can operationalize the critique inside a public company where the bureaucracy is protected by process, PR, and the polite fiction of “governance.”
Corporate communications thrives on ambiguity: mission statements, stakeholder slogans, and “alignment” rituals that make it difficult to assign blame when strategies fail. Cohen is trying to reverse that: name the culprits, tie pay to outcomes, and remove the insulation.
If he succeeds, he’ll have done something rarer than a turnaround: he’ll have made managerial parasitism socially unacceptable inside a listed company. If he fails, at least the shareholders will have gotten a clear diagnostic before the next consultant invoice arrives.