YouTuber Markiplier Just Became GoPro’s Largest Shareholder – And the Stock Jumped 46%

Industry News

by Johnnie BehiriSeptember 1^st, 2026

Subscribe to News - Industry

GoPro’s difficult year has taken a turn nobody saw coming: Mark Fischbach, the YouTuber known to tens of millions of subscribers as Markiplier, is now the company’s largest single shareholder. An SEC filing shows he quietly built an 8.5% stake worth roughly $9 million while GoPro’s board was shopping the company around. When Bloomberg broke the story on Sunday, the stock jumped 46% in a single day. The more interesting question is what a creator-turned-filmmaker actually wants with a camera maker fighting for survival.

The facts first. A Schedule 13G filed with the SEC on August 20 discloses that Fischbach holds 13.5 million GoPro Class A shares, an 8.5% position held as of July 13, with sole voting and dispositive power over the stock. At the prices GoPro traded at around that time, the stake cost somewhere in the region of $8 to $9.3 million. Bloomberg reported the story on Sunday, August 30, and the market reaction on Monday was dramatic: GPRO closed at $0.8762, up 46.1% on the day, with 142.5 million shares changing hands, more than twenty times the recent average volume, and the stock continued climbing in after-hours and premarket trading. For a company we last covered reporting a 38% drop in camera shipments and $27.3 million left in the bank, it is a remarkable change of mood.

Largest shareholder, but not the one in charge

The “largest shareholder” label needs one important qualifier. Fischbach’s 8.5% makes him the biggest single holder of GoPro’s publicly traded Class A stock, ahead of the institutional funds that have long topped that register. Founder and CEO Nicholas Woodman, however, holds his position largely through Class B shares, which carry ten votes each; according to GoPro’s proxy filings, that translated into roughly 63% of total voting power as of March 31. In other words, Markiplier now owns more of the tradeable company than anyone else, and Woodman still controls it.

The filing itself is also deliberately unambitious. A Schedule 13G is the passive variant of an ownership disclosure: by choosing it, Fischbach certified that he did not buy the shares to influence control of the company. There is no board seat request, no activist letter, no campaign. That does not make the stake meaningless (a public figure with a nine-figure audience holding 8.5% changes the atmosphere around any sale negotiation), but on paper, this is a fan buying stock, not a takeover.

Why a YouTuber is betting on GoPro

Fischbach’s own explanation, given to Bloomberg, is disarmingly simple: he loves using GoPro cameras, believes the company should survive, and looked at the share price and thought it seemed undervalued. Given that GoPro is valued at around $110 million today, against roughly $13 billion at its 2014 peak, that is at least a defensible reading of the chart, whatever one thinks of the fundamentals underneath it.

There is a filmmaking thread running through this that makes the story more than a meme-stock curiosity. Fischbach made the jump from YouTube to features this year with his horror film Iron Lung, which he financed and distributed himself and which reportedly earned around $51 million at the box office on a $3 million budget. Much of the behind-the-scenes material from that production was shot on GoPro cameras. He has also invested in Strada, the file-sharing and collaboration platform built for film workflows, and he frames both moves the same way: making professional filmmaking more accessible to independent creators.

The product that apparently tipped him over the edge is the Mission 1 Pro ILS, the interchangeable-lens model whose pre-orders opened last week ahead of early-September shipping, and which we discussed with GoPro at NAB 2026 and debated at length in Focus Check ep114. A week before the stake became public, Fischbach posted a video review praising the camera’s image quality relative to the far more expensive cinema cameras he used on Iron Lung, and saying he plans to use it extensively on future productions. GoPro markets the Mission 1 family as “compact cinema cameras”; we would still describe them as large-sensor action cameras, but the endorsement from a working filmmaker with his reach is exactly the kind GoPro’s marketing department could never buy.

The company he is buying into

None of this changes the underlying situation, which we have been tracking all year: a 23% workforce reduction, an auditor flagging substantial doubt about the company continuing as a going concern, and a board-authorized sale process that Woodman described in August as being in its later stages, with inquiries spanning the defense, consumer and financial sectors. Second-quarter revenue fell 31% to $105 million, the quarterly loss reached $51 million, and the stock spent much of the summer below the $1 mark that Nasdaq listing rules require. Even after Monday’s rally, the share price sits far below its 52-week high of $3.05.

An 8.5% stake in a $110 million company is, in absolute terms, a $9 million vote of confidence. It does not refinance the debt, restart retail sell-through, or resolve the strategic review. What it does do is inject attention, and possibly a floor of retail enthusiasm, into a sale process at precisely the moment the board is weighing offers. If serious bidders exist, GoPro’s most visible shareholder now has both an audience and a financial reason to care about the price they pay.

The Mission 1 question

For filmmakers weighing the Mission 1 series, the practical calculus we described in our Q2 coverage has not changed: buying into a new platform of proprietary mods and subscriptions still means betting on who owns GoPro in a year. What has changed is the constituency rooting for a good outcome. A passive stake cannot steer a sale, but a creator with tens of millions of followers publicly aligning himself with the Mission 1 Pro ILS, weeks before it ships, gives the platform a cultural weight its sales figures alone were not generating. Whether that translates into cameras sold, or merely into one memorable day on the stock chart, is the part no filing can settle.

Does Markiplier’s $9 million bet change how you look at GoPro, or is a passive stake just noise around a company still seeking a buyer? Don’t hesitate to let us know in the comments below!