Why did Markiplier buy 8.5% of GoPro?

What exactly did Markiplier buy in GoPro?

Markiplier currently owns 13.5 million GoPro Class A shares, equal to 8.5% of that share class when his ownership crossed the SEC reporting threshold.

The filing is under his legal name, Mark Edward Fischbach. It says the relevant ownership event happened on July 13, while the Schedule 13G itself became public on August 20.

That distinction is useful because the filing shows exactly how many shares Fischbach owned, but it does not show every purchase, the dates of those purchases or his average cost.

At GoPro’s July 13 closing price of $0.711, the block was worth about $9.6 million. That gives us a useful reference point, although it should not be repeated as Markiplier’s confirmed purchase price.

His position was large enough to make him one of the most important individual investors in a public company that, only a few years earlier, would have been far too valuable for a creator to buy such a meaningful piece of.

What Markiplier disclosed	Amount
GoPro Class A shares	13.5 million
Share of Class A stock	8.5%
Date ownership crossed the reporting threshold	July 13
Filing used	Schedule 13G

Why did Markiplier start buying GoPro shares?

Markiplier appears to have started buying GoPro because a camera he wanted to see led him to examine the company, and the stock looked absurdly cheap to him once he did.

The story started around GoPro’s MISSION 1 PRO ILS, an interchangeable-lens camera aimed much more directly at filmmakers than GoPro’s traditional action cameras.

When Fischbach encountered GoPro at the NAB trade show in Las Vegas, the company would not show him the unreleased ILS. According to his subsequent account to Bloomberg, that only made him more interested. He started paying closer attention to GoPro and buying shares.

GoPro eventually invited him to its headquarters, gave him access to the camera and later sponsored his channel. Fischbach kept buying.

His own explanation is unusually simple. He told Bloomberg that once he looked at GoPro’s stock, he thought the company was undervalued and wanted it to succeed.

The chronology makes the investment easier to understand. Markiplier did not discover GoPro through a conventional stock screen. A product caught his attention first, then the company’s collapsing valuation turned that product interest into an investment opportunity.

Was GoPro’s MISSION 1 PRO ILS really the reason Markiplier invested?

The MISSION 1 PRO ILS looks like the original trigger for Markiplier’s GoPro investment, although the size of the eventual position makes sense only once we add the valuation story.

GoPro priced the interchangeable-lens ILS at $699.99, or $599.99 for existing subscribers. It uses a 50-megapixel one-inch sensor, GoPro’s GP3 processor, open-gate recording up to 8K and a Micro Four Thirds lens mount.

For Fischbach, the interesting part was the price-to-capability ratio.

In his camera video, he compared the GoPro with the RED Komodo-X he used while making Iron Lung, a professional cinema setup with a camera body costing thousands of dollars. His broader point was that aspiring filmmakers should not need several thousand dollars just to get into serious filmmaking.

Recent hands-on reviews make his enthusiasm less crazy than it initially sounds. TechRadar found the ILS unusually capable and flexible for such a small camera, while Digital Camera World called it an affordable 8K option for filmmakers.

Those reviews also show where Markiplier’s comparison stops working. The GoPro depends heavily on manual focusing, has limited electronic communication with lenses and comes with compromises around low-light performance and ease of use.

The ILS does not make expensive cinema systems obsolete. It is a very cheap, unusually small filmmaking tool that can handle shots for which buying or renting a traditional cinema setup may be overkill.

That is exactly the type of product Fischbach has reason to care about.

Why does cheaper filmmaking gear matter so much to Markiplier now?

Cheaper filmmaking tools matter much more to Markiplier after Iron Lung because he has already proved that an independent creator can make and distribute a real theatrical film without building the usual Hollywood machine around it.

Iron Lung reportedly cost about $3 million to make and went on to gross roughly $51 million worldwide, including about $41 million domestically, according to Forbes.

Those numbers need some context. Box-office gross is not profit, and cinemas, marketing, distribution and other expenses all take their share. Even so, a creator-financed film producing more than 15 times its reported production budget at the box office is an exceptional outcome.

Fischbach also dealt personally with the things that become painful when a YouTuber turns into a filmmaker: cameras, huge video files, production workflows and distribution.

That helps explain why his activity has spread beyond making videos. He has invested in Strada, a company building media-management and collaboration technology for filmmakers, while his GoPro investment gives him exposure to the hardware side.

There is no evidence of a formal “Markiplier filmmaking empire,” and there does not need to be one.

A clear preference is emerging from his recent projects: Fischbach wants professional filmmaking to be possible with less money, fewer gatekeepers and simpler tools. GoPro fits that interest unusually well.

Was GoPro actually undervalued when Markiplier bought it?

GoPro was extremely cheap when Markiplier accumulated his position, but the company was cheap for very real reasons.

The valuation had become tiny compared with the scale of the GoPro brand and its historical sales.

GoPro generated $1.16 billion of revenue in 2021. Revenue then fell to $1.09 billion in 2022, $1.01 billion in 2023, $801 million in 2024 and $652 million in 2025.

By the end of the second quarter, GoPro itself calculated its market capitalization at only about $142 million.

That is a remarkable compression. A company still producing hundreds of millions of dollars in annual sales, with a globally recognized consumer brand, subscription revenue and a large patent portfolio, was trading at only a fraction of one year’s revenue.

But a low revenue multiple never made GoPro an obvious bargain. Sales had been shrinking for years, the company was losing money and its liquidity situation had become dangerous.

Markiplier’s “undervalued” thesis therefore required something more than believing GoPro cameras would remain popular. He needed some combination of better products, valuable intellectual property, a successful strategic transaction or a genuine business turnaround.

As of now, the strategic-transaction part of that thesis has become much more credible.

Year	GoPro revenue
2021	$1.16B
2022	$1.09B
2023	$1.01B
2024	$801M
2025	$652M

How close was GoPro to serious financial trouble?

GoPro was in serious financial trouble when Markiplier built his stake, and this is the biggest reason to view his purchase as a high-risk investment rather than an easy bargain.

The latest quarterly numbers before the ownership disclosure were ugly.

GoPro generated $105 million of second-quarter revenue, down 31% from the previous year. Camera sell-through fell 38% to roughly 291,000 units. The company lost $51 million under GAAP and reported negative adjusted EBITDA of $29 million.

Liquidity was even more worrying.

At the end of June, GoPro had $27.3 million of cash, cash equivalents and marketable securities against $87.2 million of principal debt. It had burned $47.4 million of operating cash during the first six months of the year.

GoPro's own SEC filing said there was substantial doubt about its ability to continue as a going concern. The company had also breached financial covenants before receiving lender waivers.

Its lenders then required GoPro to complete a refinancing, sale or another transaction that repaid certain outstanding amounts within 180 days of July 9.

So Markiplier was buying a company under real financial pressure. If no financing, buyer or turnaround appeared, the downside could have been severe.

The size of the purchase says a lot. He was willing to risk serious money on GoPro at a point when survival itself had become part of the investment case.

Were GoPro’s new MISSION cameras already turning the company around?

No, GoPro’s new MISSION cameras had not yet produced anything close to a proven turnaround when Markiplier accumulated his shares.

Timing gives the cameras some excuse. GoPro had only recently begun shipping the first MISSION models, while the ILS that interested Fischbach arrived later. The weak second-quarter results therefore tell us much more about the old GoPro business than about mature demand for the new lineup.

Still, the existing business was clearly shrinking. Camera unit sell-through dropped 38%, while revenue from retail channels fell 48%.

One healthier part of GoPro was emerging elsewhere. Subscription and service revenue increased 11% to $29 million and represented 28% of quarterly revenue, versus 17% a year earlier. GoPro also generated $2 million from its new AI content-licensing program, while the subscription attach rate reached a record 69%.

Those numbers show that GoPro had assets beyond selling another HERO camera every year. They do not show that MISSION had fixed the company.

Fischbach was effectively buying before that evidence existed.

Was Markiplier really betting that someone would buy GoPro?

A GoPro sale was already a serious and public possibility when Markiplier’s stake became reportable, so any complete explanation of his investment has to include that upside.

GoPro’s board had started reviewing strategic alternatives in May after receiving unsolicited interest from several sectors. Two days later, the company hired investment bank Houlihan Lokey to help explore a possible sale and other transactions.

Nick Woodman said publicly that GoPro had “substantial unrecognized value” that could potentially be unlocked through a sale or another strategic event.

By July, the pressure had increased further because of GoPro’s debt and liquidity situation.

Fischbach therefore did not need private information to recognize the setup. The company itself had told investors that it was considering a sale.

That gave his undervaluation thesis two obvious ways to work: GoPro could improve as a business, or somebody else could decide that its brand, technology and intellectual property were worth more than the stock market was paying for them.

Today, we know the second route became real.

Did Markiplier know GoPro was about to merge with Starman?

There is currently no public evidence that Markiplier knew about the Starman Optical deal while he was buying GoPro shares.

The timing naturally attracts attention. Fischbach accumulated a huge stake in a distressed company, the ownership became public and GoPro then announced a major transaction shortly afterward.

But the information available to investors already explained why somebody might make that bet.

GoPro had publicly announced that it was considering a sale. It had publicly hired Houlihan Lokey. Management had publicly discussed unsolicited interest. Its debt agreements were also pushing the company toward a refinancing or transaction.

What investors did not know was which buyer might emerge or exactly what terms GoPro might obtain.

Nothing in Fischbach’s SEC filing or the reporting around his investment currently establishes that he had access to the Starman negotiations.

The evidence supports a much narrower conclusion: Markiplier bought into a company where a transaction was publicly possible. Claims that he knew the actual Starman deal was coming go further than the available facts.

Did the Starman deal prove Markiplier was right about GoPro?

The new Starman agreement is the strongest evidence so far that Markiplier was right about GoPro having value the stock market was missing.

Under the definitive merger agreement, GoPro shareholders are expected to receive $285 million of aggregate cash consideration, described as approximately $1.14 per share subject to potential working-capital adjustments.

Existing GoPro investors would also collectively retain about 10% of the combined publicly listed company, while approximately $92 million of GoPro debt is expected to be repaid as part of the transaction.

Compare that with GoPro’s roughly $142 million market capitalization at the end of June.

The comparison is not perfectly like-for-like because debt repayment, retained equity and transaction mechanics all affect the economics. Even so, a buyer agreeing to put $285 million of cash toward shareholders only weeks after GoPro was valued around $142 million in the public market is hard to ignore.

It also says something more interesting about what was mispriced.

Starman is not buying GoPro only because it expects consumers to buy more action cameras. The transaction talks about optical technology, AI data centers, government, defense, robotics and aerospace.

GoPro says it has more than 2,500 U.S. patents. That intellectual property and optical expertise can be valuable to an industrial buyer in ways that were barely reflected in GoPro’s consumer-camera valuation.

Markiplier seems to have entered through the filmmaking door. The eventual buyer found several other rooms inside the same house.

How much did Markiplier actually pay for his GoPro stake?

We still do not know exactly how much Markiplier paid for GoPro because his SEC ownership filing does not disclose his average purchase price.

This is one of the places where a lot of coverage has been too casual.

On July 13, when the filing says Fischbach’s ownership reached the relevant reporting level, GoPro closed at $0.711 per share. At that price, 13.5 million shares were worth about $9.6 million.

But he had been buying over time. Some purchases could have been cheaper and others more expensive.

So describing Markiplier as having made a “$9.6 million investment” is too precise. The correct description is that his holding was worth roughly that amount at the July 13 closing price.

The difference becomes significant because even a small change in his average cost has a large effect across millions of shares.

Hypothetical average price	Cost of 13.5M shares
$0.70	$9.45M
$0.80	$10.80M
$1.00	$13.50M
$1.30	$17.55M

Does owning 8.5% mean Markiplier can control GoPro?

Markiplier has a huge economic position in GoPro, but 8.5% of the Class A stock gives him nowhere near 8.5% of the company’s voting power.

GoPro has a dual-class share structure.

Class A shares carry one vote each. Class B shares carry ten votes each, and founder Nick Woodman controls most of those high-vote shares.

GoPro reported that Woodman held about 60.3% of the company’s total voting power as of the end of June.

That leaves Fischbach in an unusual position. He can be one of GoPro’s largest economic owners without having any realistic ability to seize control from the founder.

His SEC filing reinforces the point. Fischbach used Schedule 13G and certified that the shares were not acquired for the purpose of changing or influencing control of GoPro.

His influence comes from somewhere else.

Markiplier can put GoPro in front of tens of millions of viewers, show filmmakers how its products perform and change the amount of attention investors give a tiny public company. The stock reaction after his stake became widely known showed how powerful that influence can be.

None of that gives him the votes to run GoPro.

Why would Markiplier buy such a huge GoPro position instead of a small stake?

Markiplier could buy such a large piece of GoPro because the company had become incredibly small in stock-market terms, and a small symbolic position would give him very little upside if his conviction was genuinely high.

GoPro’s collapse created an unusual situation.

Buying 8% of Sony or Canon would require billions of dollars. GoPro had fallen far enough that an eight-figure investment could potentially produce a stake approaching one-tenth of its Class A stock.

Forbes currently estimates Fischbach’s annual creator earnings at about $38 million. That does not tell us his net worth or how much liquid capital he has, but it helps establish the order of magnitude: an investment somewhere around the low eight figures is plausible for him while still being large enough to hurt badly if GoPro failed.

The setup starts to resemble a private startup investment.

Fischbach appears to have found a public company whose technology he understood personally, whose products fit his own work and whose collapsed valuation allowed him to build a position large enough to matter financially.

The percentage looks shocking mainly because GoPro had become so cheap.

Was Markiplier’s GoPro investment just a publicity stunt or meme-stock play?

The evidence fits a genuine investment much better than a publicity stunt, although GoPro quickly became a meme-stock story once traders discovered Markiplier’s ownership.

Fischbach had already committed the capital before the broader public understood how large his position was.

That is important. He could have generated GoPro publicity much more cheaply by signing a sponsorship, making the MISSION video or publicly announcing a tiny investment.

Instead, he quietly accumulated enough shares to trigger SEC beneficial-ownership reporting.

The market reaction came later. GoPro shares jumped sharply once financial media and retail traders connected “Mark Edward Fischbach” in the filing with Markiplier. The stock then received another powerful catalyst from the Starman announcement.

These days, that makes the price action hard to disentangle. Some buyers are reacting to Fischbach, some to the transaction and some simply to volatility.

There is no good evidence that Fischbach began buying because he planned to manufacture that frenzy.

Does Markiplier have a conflict when he reviews GoPro cameras?

Markiplier’s GoPro ownership creates a real financial conflict when he recommends GoPro products, even if his enthusiasm for the cameras is completely genuine.

His MISSION 1 PRO ILS video was connected with a GoPro sponsorship and included an affiliate link. By that point, Fischbach also had a very large financial interest in GoPro succeeding.

That combination changes how viewers should interpret the recommendation.

If more people buy GoPro cameras because Markiplier praises them, he can benefit as a sponsored creator, through affiliate economics and potentially through the value of his shares.

The ownership interest deserved particularly clear disclosure because it is far larger than the normal commercial relationship between a creator and a sponsor.

None of this shows that his camera review was dishonest. The chronology actually supports genuine product enthusiasm: Fischbach was chasing access to the ILS before GoPro eventually sponsored him.

But once somebody owns millions of shares in the manufacturer, that ownership becomes relevant context for any product recommendation.

Could Markiplier’s GoPro investment actually make sense even if the camera business keeps shrinking?

Yes. The Starman transaction now shows how Markiplier’s GoPro investment could work even without a dramatic recovery in consumer camera sales.

GoPro’s public valuation had been based heavily on a miserable story: years of falling camera revenue, operating losses and growing liquidity pressure.

A strategic buyer can value the same company differently.

Starman is explicitly talking about GoPro technology in AI infrastructure, defense, government, robotics and aerospace. GoPro had already hired Oliver Wyman earlier in the year to explore defense and aerospace opportunities.

Its portfolio of more than 2,500 U.S. patents also gives an acquirer assets that cannot be judged simply by looking at how many HERO cameras sold last quarter.

That widens the investment thesis considerably.

Markiplier may have fallen in love with a cheap cinema camera, but he bought shares in the company that owns the engineering, brand, software, subscriber relationships and intellectual property behind it.

The latest transaction suggests those assets were worth considering separately from the shrinking action-camera business.

So why did Markiplier buy 8.5% of GoPro?

Markiplier appears to have bought 8.5% of GoPro because he found a company building filmmaking technology he genuinely wanted, then realized the whole business had become cheap enough for him to make a serious distressed-value bet on it.

The MISSION 1 PRO ILS seems to have started the story. After Iron Lung, Fischbach has an obvious personal interest in making professional filmmaking cheaper and easier, and GoPro was pushing into exactly that territory with a roughly $700 interchangeable-lens camera.

Then he looked at the stock.

GoPro was still generating hundreds of millions of dollars of annual revenue and owned a famous brand, recurring subscription revenue and thousands of patents, yet its market capitalization had collapsed into the low hundreds of millions.

The catch was enormous. Revenue had been falling for years, the latest quarter was terrible, cash was disappearing and GoPro itself warned that there was substantial doubt about its ability to continue as a going concern.

Fischbach bought anyway.

We now know that GoPro was also exploring a sale during this period, something that was publicly disclosed before his position crossed the SEC reporting threshold. The recently announced Starman transaction gives that part of the thesis real weight: shareholders are expected to receive $285 million in aggregate cash consideration while retaining roughly 10% of the combined company.

There is still no evidence that Markiplier knew the Starman deal itself was coming. His SEC filing also explicitly says he did not acquire the shares to influence control, which makes the takeover theory weak.

The clearest answer is simple. Markiplier saw a product direction that matched his own ambitions as a filmmaker, found a distressed company that he thought was priced far below the value of its assets and bought enough shares for being right to matter.

As of now, the Starman deal makes that judgment look considerably better than it did when he started buying.