Background and career
Mark B. Rober (born 1980 or 1981) is an American YouTuber, engineer, inventor, and educator. He is known for his YouTube videos on popular science and do-it-yourself gadgets. Before he became a YouTuber, Rober was an engineer with NASA for nine years, where he spent seven years working on the Curiosity rover at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. He later worked for four years at Apple as a product designer in their Special Projects Group, where he authored patents involving virtual reality in self-driving cars.
Rober was raised in Brea, California, the youngest of three siblings. He graduated from Brea Olinda High School in 1998. He became interested in engineering at a young age, making a pair of goggles that helped avoid eye irritation while cutting onions. Rober graduated from Brigham Young University (BYU) in 2004 with a Bachelor of Science in mechanical engineering. He initiated into Tau Beta Pi (the National Engineering Honor Society) that same year. He later earned a Master of Science in mechanical engineering from the University of Southern California (USC) in 2014.
Rober joined NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in 2004. He worked there for nine years, seven of which were spent working on the Curiosity rover, which is now on Mars. He designed and delivered hardware on several JPL missions, including Advanced Modeling Technology (AMT), GRAIL, SMAP, and Mars Science Laboratory. While at NASA, Rober was one of the primary architects for "JPL Wired", which was a comprehensive knowledge capture wiki. He published a case study about applying wiki technology in a high-tech organization to develop an "Intrapedia" for the capture of corporate knowledge.
While at NASA, Rober began making viral videos. His videos cover a wide variety of topics, sparking ideas for April Fools' Day pranks and teaching about beating an escape room and filming primates in zoos non-invasively. He also advocates for science in many of his videos.
In October 2011, Rober recorded his first YouTube video. It shows a Halloween costume that used two iPads to create the illusion of seeing through his body. His video of the "gaping hole in torso" costume went viral, receiving 1.5 million views in one day. The following year, Rober launched Digital Dudz, an online Halloween costume company that specializes in Halloween costumes based on the same concept as the video (to which Rober holds the patent). The company took in $250,000 in revenue in its first three weeks of operations, and by 2013 his app-integrated costumes were sold in retail stores such as Party City. The costumes were widely featured on news channels such as CBS News, CNN, The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, Fox, Yahoo! News, the Discovery Channel, The Today Show and GMA. He sold the company to UK-based costume company Morphsuits in 2013.
How Mark Rober makes money
The company took in $250,000 in revenue in its first three weeks of operations, and by 2013 his app-integrated costumes were sold in retail stores such as Party City. On October 29, 2021, Rober and Donaldson created #TeamSeas, another fundraiser which had a goal of $30 million. By August 2025, over $40 million was raised for WaterAid.
Sources
Net-worth figure: Celebrity Net Worth, in USD. Biography and career facts: the person's Wikipedia article and linked reporting. Snapshot date for all StarWorth figures: 28 October 2026.
