Company profile
SEC EDGAR ↗- Industry
- Services-Business Services, NEC
- Listed
- Nasdaq: EBAY
- Incorporated
- DE
- Headquarters
- San Jose, CA
- Fiscal year end
- Dec 31
Financials
FY2025- Revenue
- $11.1B
- Net income
- $2.03B
- Total assets
- $17.6B
| Fiscal year | Revenue | Net income | Total assets |
|---|---|---|---|
| FY2025 | $11.1B | $2.03B | $17.6B |
| FY2024 | $10.3B | $1.98B | $19.4B |
| FY2023 | $10.1B | $2.77B | $21.6B |
| FY2022 | $9.79B | −$1.27B | $20.9B |
| FY2021 | $10.4B | $13.6B | $26.6B |
| FY2020 | $8.89B | $5.67B | $19.3B |
Reported fiscal years from SEC filings (10-K) — SEC EDGAR ↗. Stratrix is a strategy publication, not a real-time financial data service.
Decisions on record
2 verified Decision Records on eBay, and the casebook each one belongs to.
| Fork date | Decision type | The story | Casebook |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2005 | The Counterfactual | Read the story → | The Counterfactual Casebook → |
| 2014 | Cannibalization Choice | Read the story → | Cannibalization Choice Casebook → |
Run one of these yourself
The decisions eBay faced, as kits you can run.
Each pack takes one of these decisions and gives you the framework, a deck for the room, a model that resolves to one number, and the sourced cases behind it. $499, one-time.
Decision ForksThe CannibalizationShould you launch the thing that takes revenue from your best business?See the pack →Decision ForksThe Road Not TakenWhat did the decision you did not take actually cost?See the pack →Moat & CompetitionThe Moat AnatomyWhat would it actually cost a challenger to take your customer?See the pack →
The analyses
The Cannibalization Choice · Growth & Portfolio
eBay Killed the Auction to Become Amazon. It Got Half of Amazon and None of eBay.
eBay slowly buried the auction that built it, until Buy It Now ran ~85-88% of listings. The lesson isn't bold self-disruption: GMV that topped $90B in 2019 (a figure that included StubHub, divested in 2020) sat near $79.6B in 2025 on a post-divestiture basis. It cannibalized its only difference and inherited a fight it couldn't win.
8 min
The Cannibalization Choice · Growth & Portfolio
eBay Spun Off PayPal and Got the Smaller Half. By Design.
On its first trading day PayPal was worth $47.1 billion - eBay $34.7 billion. The parent had paid $1.5 billion for it in 2002, then let it walk out the door worth more than the company that raised it.
8 min
The Counterfactual · Decision Forks
eBay Misplaced the E-Commerce Crown $2.6 Billion at a Time — on an Internet Phone Company
The popular story says Amazon raced past eBay in the early 2000s. It didn't — Amazon's enterprise value only passed eBay's in 2008. The crown wasn't seized in a battle; it was misplaced, $2.6 billion at a time, on an internet phone company.
8 min
The Moat Anatomy · Moat & Competition
eBay Is Shedding Scale for Margin — ~70% of GMV Now Sits in a Few Passion Categories
Everyone says eBay is dying between Amazon's scale and Etsy's niche. The truth is stranger: it's deliberately shedding scale for margin, with ~70% of GMV now concentrated in a handful of passion categories - which is both the moat and the trap.
8 min