When Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s Tehran compound was reduced to rubble by an Israeli strike, at the end of February, a Polymarket user called magamyman netted around $553,000, having bet that the Supreme Leader would no longer be in power by the end of March. Other speculators had cashed in by successfully predicting when the war would start. “It’s insane this is legal,” Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy posted on X. California Representative Mike Levin noted that magamyman bought in on the position when the probability of a strike was at 17 percent—just 71 minutes before the news broke publicly.
Making money by predicting the deaths of human beings one has never met may seem venal (particularly if there is more than dumb luck involved). But it is not new. Using insurance contracts to bet on the outcomes of wars was so commonplace in the late Middle Ages that the practice was legally prohibited in Genoa. Not so in laissez-faire London, where unregulated insurance markets enabled all kinds of grotesque gambling schemes to thrive. Large sums were wagered on the outcome of Oliver Cromwell’s second siege of Limerick and the date of the fall of Namur in the Nine Years’ War.
