NEW YORK, July 17 — Ryan Cohen, the Canadian billionaire who built Chewy into the dominant online pet retailer before selling it in a record-breaking deal, has become something of a Rorschach test for American retail investors. To one camp, he is the “Meme King,” a folk hero who rallied a Reddit army and dragged GameStop back from the brink of irrelevance. To the other, he is a disciplined operator who quietly cut costs and returned the video-game chain to profitability.
The technical reality is more prosaic — and arguably more impressive — than the meme-stock mythology suggests. Cohen never attended college.
He started his first business at 15 and cites his father, Ted Cohen, as his primary inspiration. In 2011, at 25, he founded Chewy under the name MrChewy, an idea sparked by shopping for his poodle Tylee. The early pitch to venture capital was brutal: he approached over 100 firms and was rejected by every one before securing $15 million from Volition Capital in 2013.
By 2016, Chewy had reached $900 million in sales and claimed the top spot in U.S. online pet retail.
The Chewy exit and the GameStop play
In April 2017, PetSmart bought Chewy for $3.35 billion — at the time, the largest e-commerce acquisition on record. Cohen stayed on as CEO, growing revenue to $3.5 billion in 2018 before stepping down. Chewy went public in June 2019 at an $8.7 billion valuation; by fiscal 2024, it posted $11.86 billion in net sales.
The detail that matters about the GameStop turnaround is under the hood. Cohen joined the board in January 2021 alongside two Chewy executives, became chairman that June, and took the CEO seat in September 2023.
He inherited a business that was burning cash and losing relevance as digital game downloads killed physical retail. His strategy was blunt: cut everything that did not directly serve the customer or the margin. Selling, general and administrative expenses fell from about $1.7 billion in fiscal 2021 to $910.2 million in fiscal 2025 — a 47 percent reduction.
The company moved from an operating loss in fiscal 2024 to net income of $418.4 million in fiscal 2025, helped by growth in collectibles and graded trading cards. As ever, the financial turnaround has not silenced the noise around the stock.
Cohen’s influence on meme stocks — GameStop first, then a wider ecosystem of heavily shorted names — earned him the “Meme King” label from market watchers who view the volatility as a sideshow.
What to watch next
GameStop reported record operating income in early 2026, a milestone that would have seemed far-fetched five years ago. The question now is whether Cohen can sustain the profitability without the meme-stock tailwind, or whether the collectibles and trading-card business — a higher-margin pivot — can carry the company through the next phase of retail disruption. The man who was rejected by over 100 venture firms and turned a pet-supply idea into an $11.86 billion revenue machine is not done proving something.
The market will watch what he does next.
