In the best of circumstances, betting on world events for fun and profit on marketplaces like Kalshi and Polymarket is an innocent way to make reading the news a little more interesting. Unfortunately, some suspect there are rascals out there who want to ruin it for everyone else by placing unfair, insider bets with the potential to corrupt the motives of powerful figures and their advisors. So with that in mind, when I say this next thing, I don’t want you to be suspicious:
On Friday, something that very much looks like a brand new account on Polymarket plowed $30,000 into bets on the toppling of Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro. By the very next morning, when Maduro was suddenly no longer able to act as president of Venezuela anymore due to having been dragged out of his bed by the U.S. military and spirited out of his country, that account had apparently bagged $436,759.61 according to Axios’s Herb Scribner. It’s not spelled out where that number is coming from, but an archive.ph snapshot being circulated on social media places the amount at $407,920.12, so either way, this lucky person made a lot of money off their totally wild guess.
And hey, it’s not unthinkable that this may have been a wild guess. As the Wall Street Journal pointed out in a piece outlining the timeline of Maduro-related bets on Polymarket, there were six contracts involving the Maduro-leaves-power issue, and people placed $56.6 million worth of bets on them. $40 million of that action was about him leaving by Nov. 30 or Dec. 31, which he didn’t. Nonetheless, the piece paints a startling picture of bettors on Friday night and early Saturday morning suddenly clustering around the hunch that Maduro was about to leave power.
Bets on how long Maduro is going to be in U.S. custody are not looking very favorable for the deposed leader. A release by January 9 had a 1% chance, and a release by the end of the 2026 had only 15% as of this writing.
English (US) ·