StubHub has spent years selling itself as a neutral marketplace where fans buy and sell tickets to each other, free of scalpers driving up prices. A CBC News investigation has now found that the company’s own CEO has a financial stake in doing exactly that.
The investigation found that StubHub CEO Eric Baker is part-owner and managing director of a hedge fund called Andro Capital, which has resold millions of dollars worth of tickets directly on StubHub since 2008. The disclosure came from securities filings StubHub made with the SEC ahead of its IPO on the New York Stock Exchange last September.
StubHub also has a financing arrangement with Colloquy Capital, an Andro affiliate, that provides short-term capital to other large-scale resellers so they can buy tickets in bulk and list them on StubHub for resale.
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The disclosure had sat largely unnoticed in StubHub’s IPO filings until CBC’s investigative team dug into them amid unrelated fallout over the company’s cancellation of thousands of ticket orders for World Cup matches. That fallout had already triggered separate investigations by Consumer Protection BC and the Texas attorney general, placing StubHub’s practices under scrutiny that revealed Baker’s ties to Andro Capital.
The company has long marketed itself as a neutral “marketplace for fans to buy and sell tickets,” comparing itself to eBay and insisting it doesn’t own, hold, or sell tickets itself. Technically, the CEO’s financial stake in a scalping operation doesn’t violate that claim, since Baker’s fund is technically an independent seller, not StubHub the company. But critics say it undercuts the spirit of that pitch.
“It’s just very deceiving,” Randy Nichols, a researcher for the National Independent Talent Organization, told CBC. “StubHub’s told the public they’re a marketplace… what they leave out is that their CEO is a large ticket seller.”
StubHub maintains that none of this is illegal, and that Baker’s ownership stake “has been fully disclosed in StubHub’s public SEC filings.” The company’s broader public response has been to repeat that it “does not own, possess, or sell tickets” and is simply a technology platform connecting buyers and sellers.
New York ticket buyer Louis Sanquini filed a proposed $5 million class-action lawsuit against StubHub and Baker days after CBC’s report, alleging deceptive practices and fraudulent misrepresentation.
The suit argues buyers would have made different choices had they known about the conflict of interest, pointing to a 2023 Kiss concert the plaintiff attended using the platform.
StubHub agreed in April to pay $10 million to settle claims from multiple state attorneys general over hidden fees added at checkout, and now faces separate lawsuits and investigations tied to its World Cup ticket failures.
Professional scalpers are estimated to control 70 to 80% of tickets sold on major resale platforms industry-wide, driving up prices for ordinary fans. StubHub itself processed $9.2 billion in US ticket transactions in 2025 and is considered the largest resale platform in the business.
