With a stacked slate of football games this weekend (go Illini, finally ranked top 10 again after what feels like a two-decade witness protection stint), it feels almost poetic to talk about one of the biggest ticket grifters alive. The same crew that’s had me, a fully grown man, staring at my laptop ready to cry after watching a $120 ticket for my favorite team magically morph into $210 the second I hit “checkout.”

If you haven’t guessed by now, I’m talking about Stubhub. The online ticket scalper started in the middle of the dot com bubble that built an empire on “convenience fees” finally decided to play with the big boys on Wall Street… and quickly learned investors are just as unforgiving as customers who have been shafted for years by a million fees.

After years of dragging its feet (first pulling the plug in April when Trump’s tariff talk scared everyone sh*tless, then pausing again as regulators started sniffing around the resale racket) StubHub finally made it onto the NYSE stage this week. But instead of a sold-out crowd, it looked more like an empty stadium after a rain delay. Shares have now fallen three straight sessions, capped with a 10% dump yesterday. The stock is already down 21% from its $23.50 IPO price. Investors who bought the IPO hype thought they scored floor seats, but wound up watching on the Jumbotron from behind a nacho stand.

This comes while Klarna, Figma, Circle, and Netskope are ripping like meme stocks with a Sydney Sweeney endorsement. For whatever reason, StubHub has become bagholder central.

Which begs the question: what’s the actual problem here? For starters, StubHub somehow managed to turn nearly $400M in quarterly revenue into a $35.9M net loss. The math ain’t mathin. And unlike SaaS or AI darlings, there’s no shiny “future growth” story to paper over the red ink.

CEO Eric Baker went on live TV trying to calm investors, pointing the finger at “new federal ticket pricing rules” for a one-time hit. Translation: regulators finally told them to quit disguising half your ticket cost as “processing fees,” and Wall Street suddenly realized the emperor has been running around pantsless the whole time.

(Source: CNBC)

Speaking of regulators, the FTC just dropped a lawsuit on Ticketmaster/Live Nation, putting the entire resale racket under the microscope. That means in addition to StubHub fighting bad press… it’s staring down regulators, bots, and a consumer base that already hates its guts.

The fallout from that has resulted in StubHub’s market cap shrinking from $8.6B at IPO to $6.8B in under a week. Nearly $2B gone just like that. And unlike Klarna or Figma, which at least have a growth story to lean on, StubHub is just a ticket scalper with an ankle bracelet under house arrest.

In my opinion, StubHub’s problem isn’t tariffs or timing… it’s that everybody already knows the joke. It’s just a middleman that piles on fees, gums up the process, and leaves fans furious. Hedge funds don't want it, fans don’t want it, and now the FTC is sharpening the guillotine.

So yeah, StubHub’s IPO didn’t reveal anything we didn’t already know… it just put the clown makeup on in high definition. What floored me was how fast investors smelled the rot. You can’t build a business on junk fees, fake “convenience,” and universal customer hatred and then expect Wall Street to clap like seals. No shot. Honestly, I wouldn’t be shocked if a bunch of people who’ve never shorted a stock in their lives finally did it with STUB… just to get a little payback for all those $60 “processing fees.”

At the time of publishing this article, Stocks.News doesn’t hold positions in companies mentioned in the article.