The world’s burning. Who’s betting on it?
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Opinion<br>·June 1, 2026<br>The world’s burning. Who’s betting on it?<br>Prediction markets are fuelling addiction and desensitisation
Text: Ning ChangImage: Walker Gawande
Ning Chang Editor
In the right wing circle of hell that is X, a user posted an April 30th exchange between US Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Triumph the Insult Comic Dog, a comedic hand puppet character of early aughts MTV and late-night fame.
“This dog is a pain in the ass,” Rubio says, half-smiling.
“Just tell me what country you’re attacking next,” Triumph replies. “I’m trying to win some money on Polymarket.”
I came across this clip when I was doing my once-in-a-blue-moon muckraking, and it struck me as the kind of fucked-up nonsense that our politics have become these days. Trump’s circus clown Marco Rubio squaring off with a Letterman-era heckling dog, who seems to acknowledge the fundamental truth at the heart of our dysfunctional system – it’s all a tongue-in-cheek cash grab off of human suffering.
We know the Trump presidency is benefits a whole range of profiteers – Palantir, GEO Group, Paragon, Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Blackrock, Amazon, Walmart, oil and gas companies, Big Tech, AI self-cannibalisers… but, now, ordinary people can also profit from this presidency’s chaos. On prediction markets like Polymarket and Kalshi, anybody over 18 in the US can gamble on the collapse of our democracy.
Mo’ problems, Mo’ money
Polymarket, founded in 2020 (banned by the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission in 2022, un-banned at the end of 2025), allows people to bet cryptocurrency on real-world events. Kalshi, a competitor site founded in 2021 (in legal hot water with the CFTC in 2023, with business as usual resuming in 2024), offers a similar marketplace to trade on real-world events. They are officially classified as “prediction markets” – placing them in the same family as stocks and futures, rather than on the ponies.
Both claim they are more than a glorified gambling site – their platforms are a way to capture crowd sentiment on important issues in real time. Maybe the ebb and flow of mass approval and disapproval is most easily measured by daily market rhythms valued in the hundreds of millions. This promise of real-time, unvarnished crowdsourced wisdom has made it an attractive source of data for politicos, statisticians, and armchair forecasters in today’s uncertain age.
After Polymarket accurately predicted Trump’s reelection in 2024 – beating out traditional forecasting – its market value jumped. At the end of 2025, Kalshi signed lucrative partnerships with legacy media like CNN and CNBC, and Polymarket with Yahoo Finance.
“The long-term vision is to financialise everything and create a tradable asset out of any difference in opinion,” said Tarek Mansour, CEO of Kalshi. And they really mean any opinion.
Polymarket and Kalshi don’t just host markets on elections or sports, they also host markets betting on Russia capturing cities in Ukraine, on whether or not Palestinians would face famine in 2025, how many people Trump would deport by the end of the year, if the US will annex a 51st state, and when Israel might launch a ground invasion of Iran.
Dystopian much? These are the kinds of things that you imagine whisky-swilling, cigar-puffing robber barons discussing on their Martian colony – understanding very human impacts on millions of people in terms of dollars and cents, profits and loss.
The rise of these betting markets fuels a sense of total apathy and self-profiting nihilism about our world. There’s something disgusting to me about seeing the dollar values people are cashing in over events that, on principle, are sickening. 26 cents can buy you a “Yes” stake on Trump invoking the Insurrection Act before 2027 – cashing out means you’re in a world where a Trump-controlled state of emergency rules supreme. But none of that matters, right? Not when that 26 cents can exponentially grow into hundreds of thousands, even millions. Not when the bet is next to “Will the US reveal the existence of aliens?” on the Kalshi homepage. Not when people in the comments section of the market reply to each other with funny memes.
The platforms themselves cultivate this culture. A June 2025 AI-generated Kalshi ad declared, “The world’s gone mad, bet on it” – why would the average citizen bother to make the world better when you can individually profit off of having it burn?
The United States of Insider Trading
It’s no surprise that the current Trump administration has glommed onto betting platforms like Kalshi and Polymarket – both are an engine for this crassness and cruelty. Gamifying famine, bombing, regime change, and more is pretty much the M.O. of a presidency and administration that does...