Joshua Davis
Joshua Davis is the journalist who wrote the article that made KmikeyM known outside Portland. His March 2013 feature for WIRED, “Meet the Man Who Sold His Fate to Investors at $1 a Share,” followed Mike Merrill for more than a year and remains the single most important piece of press in the project’s history. It quadrupled the shareholder base and led directly to a Hollywood option. If you have read one article about KmikeyM, it is probably this one.
The WIRED feature
Davis reported the story over the course of a year, watching shareholders extend their authority further into Merrill’s life while he reported it. The piece ran in WIRED’s April 2013 issue and online on March 28, 2013.
A cluster of major coverage landed the same week: Fast Company, CNBC and Today, The Atlantic, Yahoo Finance, and the Daily Mail. The feature quadrupled the shareholder base, taking it past 500. Every subsequent wave of press about KmikeyM has, in one way or another, been downstream of it.
See Press and Media Coverage for the full record.
The film option
Fox Searchlight acquired the article in 2014 as a starring and directing vehicle for Jason Bateman under the working title IPO Man. The option was not exercised and lapsed in 2016. No film was made.
This is the closest KmikeyM has come to a screen adaptation.
Who he is
Davis (born 1974) writes about technology, true crime, and unusual people, and is a contributing editor at WIRED. His work has also appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Men’s Journal, and Fast Company.
His books include The Underdog (2006), Entrenched (2011), McAfee’s Last Stand (2012), Spare Parts (2014), and The Uncertainty Principle (2025). Spare Parts, about four undocumented teenagers who beat MIT in an underwater robotics competition, was adapted into a 2015 Lionsgate film starring George Lopez, Jamie Lee Curtis, and Marisa Tomei.
In 2013 he co-founded Epic Magazine with Joshuah Bearman, a publication built around long-form nonfiction written to be adapted for film and television. Vox Media acquired it in 2019.
Connection to KmikeyM
Davis came to the story through the Portland network rather than a pitch. He was introduced in June 2012 by Jona Bechtolt, who later executive produced Blippo+ with Merrill, and he bought shares before he wrote a word. He pitched WIRED within three weeks of that first conversation.
That sequence is worth stating plainly, because it is unusual and the article does not hide it: the reporter was a shareholder in his subject. Buying in was also, in a project whose whole proposition is that anyone can, the most direct way to observe how it works.
References
- Joshua Davis, “Meet the Man Who Sold His Fate to Investors at $1 a Share,” WIRED, March 28, 2013
- “Jason Bateman Is ‘IPO Man’; He’ll Direct, Star As Man Who Sold Stock In Himself,” Deadline, October 2014, https://deadline.com/2014/10/jason-bateman-is-ipo-man-hell-direct-star-as-man-who-sold-stock-in-self-864281/
- Joshua Davis (writer), Wikipedia