Outbid at delirious levels during the pandemic, the stock has traded between $25 and $30 since last year. This brings the enterprise value - market capitalization minus excess cash - to around $7 billion.

Not bad for a company that has burned through $650 million in cash over its last five fiscal years, and made almost three times as many book losses.

However, it was a stroke of genius to raise more than $1.6 billion by issuing new shares at the height of the mania! This miraculous infusion would have put things back on track, and kept the patient alive.

But for how long? Results for the first quarter of fiscal 2023 show no sign of a trend reversal. Sales eroded by 10% and the business burned $98 million.

Such resilience is almost astonishing, at a time when other retailers in sectors more in vogue than console and video game sales are going out of business one after the other.

But the real news, of course, is the ousting of CEO Matt Furlong, replaced at the drop of a hat by Ryan Cohen, GameStop's first shareholder via his vehicle RC Ventures.

Cohen, also nicknamed the "meme stock king", has a reputation that is, to say the least, sulphurous. His involvement in a "pump and dump" scheme on Bed Bath & Beyond shares has earned him legal action.

Five years ago, the extraordinary sale of Chewy to PetSmart for $3.35 billion - a record at the time - was also tainted by suspicions of wrongdoing.