Polymarket Founder Is Youngest Self-Made Billionaire After Deal With NYSE Owner (yahoo.com) 56
Shayne Coplan, a 27-year-old NYU dropout who founded Polymarket from his bathroom in 2020, has become the youngest self-made billionaire after Intercontinental Exchange (owner of the NYSE) invested up to $2 billion in his once-controversial prediction market platform. Bloomberg reports: A couple of years after dropping out of New York University with dreams of making it big in crypto, Shayne Coplan was so broke that he took an inventory of his Lower East Side apartment so that he could sell belongings to make rent. Fed up with crypto grifts, in 2019 he started to explore economist Robin Hanson's ideas on prediction markets and their potential for improving society's ability to identify likely outcomes. "This is too good of an idea to just exist in whitepapers," he recalled thinking in a later post on X. Then Covid struck -- the perfect time to develop an app for stuck-at-home folks to bet on real-world outcomes, he reasoned. He began building Polymarket from his bathroom and launched the platform in June 2020.
It wasn't a smooth road. The company's move-fast, ask-permission-later approach repeatedly ran afoul of regulators, who forced it to ban US-based users for years because it wasn't a registered exchange. A week after the 2024 presidential election -- one that Polymarket users wagered more than $3 billion on -- Coplan's apartment was raided by FBI agents. But he and his company are now riding high after Intercontinental Exchange Inc., the owner of the New York Stock Exchange, said it would invest as much as $2 billion in Polymarket at an $8 billion pre-money valuation. That deal makes its 27-year-old founder the youngest self-made billionaire tracked by the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
It wasn't a smooth road. The company's move-fast, ask-permission-later approach repeatedly ran afoul of regulators, who forced it to ban US-based users for years because it wasn't a registered exchange. A week after the 2024 presidential election -- one that Polymarket users wagered more than $3 billion on -- Coplan's apartment was raided by FBI agents. But he and his company are now riding high after Intercontinental Exchange Inc., the owner of the New York Stock Exchange, said it would invest as much as $2 billion in Polymarket at an $8 billion pre-money valuation. That deal makes its 27-year-old founder the youngest self-made billionaire tracked by the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
It's a shame really (Score:5, Insightful)
>improving society's ability to identify likely outcomes
If only people got rich for improving society instead of ... this.
And before you push up your glass and snort, I urge you to consider why prediction is in fact not a necessary condition to improve anything.
Re: (Score:2)
"TheStatsMan" doesn't think more accurate prediction helps improve things.
Note: I said "helps improve things" not "is necessary to improve things."
Re: (Score:2)
>"TheStatsMan" doesn't think more accurate prediction helps improve things.
Yeah, that's right. My life's work is prediction. And yet the statement I made is still true.
Re:I'm confused (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
It hasn't really changed. You got old.
Re: I'm confused (Score:2)
I used to love "South Park" (Score:2)
Fed up with crypto grifts (Score:5, Funny)
He made his own
so, uh (Score:5, Insightful)
The SEC goes after him for violating laws on trading, he leaves the country and bets big money that Trump will win, Trump wins, and now the NYSE is investing 2 billion dollars in his company
This doesn't sound strange at all
Re:so, uh (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: so, uh (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
Isn't that a conflict of interest for the NYSE to invest in a stock?
That's only if you assume you have a right to the money that the Fed lent you when you were paid your wages. In fact, that money really belongs to the billionaires and you should thank them for the time you were allowed use of it. Once you understand that, you'll see that the SEC and the FED really work for Trump and Coplan (at least as of this deal) and so there's no conflict of interest.
\s ? \j? maybe \{jokes no longer possible, now truth *is* the joke}.
Re: (Score:2)
Honestly I kind of wish I knew about it before hand. It was so blatantly obvious he was going to win or be dead close.
Jesus fucking Christ (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't think anyone has realized the scale of our fuck up yet. Better start picking out your favorite flavor of cat food that you're going to live off of. And better have a dry option has a backup.
Re: (Score:3)
If crypto gets zero’d out tomorrow, it probabl
Stocks are massively overvalued (Score:2)
A lot of us are not going to survive that. Even if you think you're a critical you're not.
I'm on a prescription antihistamine and my drugs get delivered and they just kind of stopped. I sometimes forget to take it so I had a little extra so I hadn't noticed immediately.
So I go in and see my doctor and it turns out the rep who makes sure the
Re: Jesus fucking Christ (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
2008 was bad for all of 3 months. The DOW dropped by 45% over a couple of months, and then rebounded in about 6 weeks and never looked back.
1/4/08 Dow was at 12800
3/13/08 Dow bottomed at 7223
4/29/08 Dow was back at 12810.
Re: (Score:2)
Same dates...
1/4/08 S&P 1411
3/13/08 S&P 1315
4/29/08 S&P 1390
This will not end well (Score:5, Insightful)
Wow. I feel like I just won cryptobro-bingo. The bets are in crypto, which means the real value is “who the f*&k knows”. The “multibillion dollar investment” is actually “up to 3 billion dollars” and is much more likely to be closer to $1 than a ten figure sum. Or it’ll all be in crypto which, again, means insert-whatever-number-you-feel-like.
He’s in bed with the Trump family. That’s not just partisan spew. The business has direct links to the Trumps. Love them, hate them, or something in between. They NEVER make money for anyone else. Ever. If you’re in the Trump orbit, the money flows FROM you TOWARDS them.
This dude’s story will end badly.
Re: (Score:2)
A 27 year old college dropout who decided that crypto was too boring so he started a gambling website and became a billionaire? .
Gambling has been lucrative since a bunch of cavemen got together and started rolling rocks in the back of the cave for the best cut of Wooly Mammoth. That's never going to change. The dropout will more than likely die a rich man.
Re: (Score:2)
Nah. Its kind of like that stupid movie "Money Plane" You can bet on the outcomes of anything and the app takes a cut. Like an example, "How long will this streamer last till they crash?" or "What will be Diddy's sentence?" There are just to many board rich foals out there.
How is it not gambling? (Score:2)
What's the catch that makes this not gambling? And how does it become an exchange?
Are the "bets" actually viewed as commodities or something?
Re: (Score:2)
What's the catch that makes this not gambling?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] - "Prediction markets, also known as betting markets..."
AFAICT, investing in the stock market is not gambling because they use other words for it, more or less. Maybe it's just one of the many forms of (soon to be) legalized gambling?
Crypto-collateralized shell game /s (Score:2)
--
ps: the real economy is fcuked
I see bathroom is the new garage (Score:5, Funny)
...who founded Polymarket from his bathroom in 2020
He sounds like a regular Steve Jobs... with diarrhea...
Re: (Score:2)
Yeah why was he in his bathroom? Did he airbnb the rest of his apartment? Genius. Rent out every bit of the apartment you rent to cover your rent while you pitch your crypto-scam from your bath tub on Zoom. This is the underdog pulling himself up by the bootstraps story of the year!
self-made?? whut? (Score:2)
"the owner of the New York Stock Exchange, said it would invest as much as $2 billion in Polymarket at an $8 billion pre-money valuation. That deal makes its 27-year-old founder the youngest self-made billionaire tracked by the Bloomberg Billionaires Index."
Re: self-made?? whut? (Score:2)
Circles (Score:2)
So a crypto betting platform on anything... (Score:2)
Why the bathroom? (Score:2)
Did he already sell all his chairs?
sam bankman-fried friend (Score:2)
Nothing is shady around all this. I'm sure he'll enjoy sharing a cell with sam bankman-fried in a couple of years.