Polymarket, a prediction market platform, attracted national attention after an anonymous bettor living in France placed massive wagers on Donald Trump to win the 2024 presidential election. Polymarket founder and CEO Shayne Coplan described the episode on 60 Minutes: the bettor — known on the site as “Domer” — built positions large enough that when Trump won, the man’s profits exceeded $80 million.
Prediction markets like Polymarket let users buy and sell shares tied to outcomes (yes/no, winner-takes-all). Prices move as traders place bets, and those prices function as a market-derived probability for an event. Coplan emphasized that Polymarket isn’t a poll; it aggregates participants’ money-backed beliefs about who is most likely to win, creating incentives for people to find useful information that confers an edge.
The French bettor reportedly commissioned private polling in swing states, using a technique called “neighbor polling” — asking respondents not who they would vote for but who they believed their neighbors would support. That approach can surface preferences hidden in conventional polls, especially where social desirability or low response rates bias answers. Domer concluded Trump was undervalued by public polling and moved heavily into the market on that basis.
Large trades change the dynamics of a market: a very big buyer attracts attention and can prompt others to take the opposite side, but they also incentivize deeper research. Coplan said big markets draw “smart money” that sifts through data, weighing what matters. On Polymarket, the size of a wager matters because it creates incentives to dig for truth; when markets are sufficiently deep, the potential payoff can justify expensive private research.
Polymarket’s case illustrates how financial incentives can concentrate information from private polls, alternative question framing (like neighbor polling), and concentrated betting. The “French whale” won big when the market’s underpriced outcome occurred, and those on the other side of his trades lost substantial sums — a high-profile example of prediction markets translating private research and conviction into market profits.
