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Polymarket, the popular prediction market, has been doing really well lately. In fact, it’s been doing so well that Bloomberg is out with a new story that claims the site’s founder, Shayne Coplan, is officially America’s youngest “self-made billionaire,” a term which is quite confusing.
To review, Coplan’s newfound riches are the result of a recent business deal with the owner of the New York Stock Exchange, who has promised to invest billions in the 27-year-old’s company. As such, Coplan has managed to become Silicon Valley’s latest success story, and he is now worthy of a write-up about his supposedly meritocratic rise to fame and fortune. Indeed, Bloomberg’s story, which includes the typical hagiographical details, charts Coplan’s rise from his modest beginnings in a Manhattan apartment building:
At any rate, whatever Coplan’s official financial ranking and its appropriate designation, the clear takeaway here is that Polymarket is enjoying a comeback, and Coplan is reaping the benefits of it.
Polymarket obviously needed a comeback because, in 2022, the Commodities Futures Trading Commission accused the site of having offered illegal trading services, and, for two years after that, as part of its settlement with the government, the site was forced to promise that it would not operate inside the U.S. In 2023, despite these promises, the CFTC opened a new probe into the platform. Then, in 2024, Coplan’s apartment was raided by the FBI. Later, it was reported that the DOJ had opened its own investigation into the site.
Ever since Trump returned to office, Polymarket has fared significantly better. In July, Bloomberg reported that the administration had ended both probes into the prediction platform. Not long afterward, Polymarket announced its victorious return to the U.S. as part of a deal to acquire a derivatives exchange and a clearinghouse. In June, the company had also announced a partnership with Elon Musk’s X (formerly Twitter), which Coplan said would allow his platform to “provide contextualized, data-driven insights to millions of Polymarket users around the world instantaneously.”
Would Coplan have ever been a billionaire if not for one Donald J. Trump? We’ll never truly know.
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Source: Gizmodo