An 8.5% stake makes Markiplier GoPro’s largest individual holder
A Schedule 13G dated 20 August put Mark Fischbach — the YouTuber who has gone by Markiplier for the better part of two decades — on the register with 8.5% of GoPro, roughly $9.3 million at the time of filing, and made him the largest individual holder of a company whose cameras he has been using for years.
He is not a fund and he is not an activist. By his own account he looked at where the stock was trading and decided the market had the business wrong, then spent months quietly building the position and learning the disclosure rules that came with it.
The company he bought into is in trouble. GoPro is down sharply over the past year and worse over five, said in May that it was weighing strategic alternatives, and has since put going-concern language in its own filings. None of that deterred him; he kept adding.
Fischbach frames the investment as part of a wider interest in lowering the cost of making films. He has also backed Strada, which builds tooling for moving large footage between collaborators.
He has some standing to make the argument. His self-distributed feature Iron Lung took roughly $51 million against a $3 million budget this year, released without a studio behind it.
GoPro cameras shot the behind-the-scenes footage on that film, though he did not think they were good enough for the film itself. A teaser for a new interchangeable-lens body is what changed his mind about the hardware — and, it seems, about the company.
The market took the filing at face value. GPRO closed 31 August up 46% on 220 million shares, and kept going after the bell.