Mark 'Markiplier' Fischbach has bought an 8.5 percent stake in GoPro, making him the company's single largest shareholder. The same week, Jill Lepore's new book, reviewed in The Atlantic, argues that the tech billionaires who built our world took the wrong lessons from their favorite science fiction. The Markiplier story is a data point for the argument and also its refutation.
What the Wrong Sci-Fi Lesson Looks Like
Lepore's thesis, as rendered by The Atlantic, is that the founding mythology of Silicon Valley is adolescent: a fantasy of lone geniuses, unlimited frontiers, and tools that liberate rather than control. The 13-year-old boy reading Heinlein did not read Ursula K. Le Guin. What he built, as a result, was an attention economy that extracts rather than connects, scale that replaces community, platforms that simulate participation while concentrating power. The Elon Musk trajectory is the purest expression of this: the sci-fi reader who builds the rockets from the books and never asks who they are for.
Markiplier Is a Different Genre
Markiplier, by contrast, is native to a different story entirely. He did not read about an audience; he built one through radical transparency over fifteen years on YouTube. His GoPro bet is not a power play. It is, if anything, an act of brand alignment: a creator whose entire identity is first-person POV footage buying into the company that makes first-person POV cameras. The investment logic is legible to his audience in a way that most venture moves are not. This is the creator economy at its most coherent, capital deployed as content, ownership as story. Kyle Chayka's work on algorithmic homogenization is useful here: the platforms that Lepore critiques have also, accidentally, produced a new kind of media owner who cannot be separated from his audience. Markiplier owning GoPro is not Silicon Valley sci-fi. It is something the genre never predicted.