Polymarket, the Gambling Startup Funded By Donald Trump Jr., Bet Big on the Golden Globes
At several points during the Golden Globes Sunday night, between acceptance speeches and Nikki Glaser bits, a list of percentages flashed on screen.“Kevin, we've got to talk about the award for best standup special,” Marc Malkin, one of the evening's presenters, said at one point to his co-host. “Do you think you know who's going to win?”Kevin Frazier replied: “Listen all the nominees tonight are so funny, but it looks like there's a familiar face pulling ahead on the Polymarket predictions.” A graphic on the screen showed Ricky Gervais's Netflix special Mortality with a 71% chance of winning the category, far ahead of shows from Kumail Nanjiani and Brett Goldstein.The promotion is the (no doubt lucrative) product of a collaboration between Polymarket, a crypto-based betting company The New Yorker once described as “a stock exchange for current events,” and the Golden Globes, hosted by Paramount.“It's the world's largest prediction market,” Shayne Coplan, Polymarket's 27-year-old founder and CEO, told my colleague John Ross inside the ceremony. “People are able to go and put money behind their opinions and as a result you get the odds of what's likely to happen.”Coplan touted the predictive success of the Polymarket wagers for the Globes. “So everyone around has been looking at the Polymarket on who's going to win each category and it's crazy it keeps calling it,” he said. “Instead of it being betting against the house, people bet basically against each other. So there's this dance, which is what we call price discovery, which finds the odds—it's like, what's the percentage? The percentage you see is derived from the trading activity. And it's really accurate. It's the most accurate thing we have.”Evangelists of these prediction markets have long maintained they aren't just slot machines for current events; they serve as almost prophetic forecasts for outcomes. In the wake of the 2024 election, Coplan boasted that prediction markets were more accurate than polling. The markets have certainly captured the imagination of consumers: $3.6 billion was wagered on that election, according to CBS News. They have also caught the attention of the political class. Donald Trump Jr.'s VC fund 1789 Capital invested in Polymarket last year—reportedly to the tune of tens of millions—and Trump Jr. himself signed on as an adviser.The Globes integration is yet another sign of just how much these prediction markets have infiltrated American culture. As the journalist Rachel Karten lamented on X, formerly Twitter: “Everything is gambling.” Karten is right; these days, companies like Polymarket and its competitor Kalshi have gamified every facet of our politics and culture. Gone are the days when punters had their imaginations limited to the ponies. On Polymarket's homepage Sunday night, if one felt lucky enough, they could place wagers on everything from Ayatollah Ali Khamenei getting dumped as Iran's Supreme Leader by the end of the month to the number of Elon Musk tweets posted by Tuesday.The Globes bets were a hit with its users. But the markets weren't, as Coplan suggested, infallible as forecasts. More than $185,000 was placed on the winner for Best Motion Picture, Drama.Polymarket heavily favored Sinners, with a dominant 57%—the moment before Hamnet won.
