Is the founder of Polymarket really the youngest self-made billionaire?

Popular prediction market Polymarket has been performing well lately. In fact, things did so well that Bloomberg went out with them New story It claims that the site’s founder, Shane Coplan, is officially America’s youngest “self-made billionaire,” which is a very confusing term.

To review, Coplan’s newfound riches are a result A recent business deal With the owner of the New York Stock Exchange, who promised to invest billions in the 27-year-old’s company. As such, Coplan has succeeded in becoming Silicon Valley’s latest success story, and is now worth writing about his supposed rise to fame and fortune on merit. Indeed, Bloomberg’s story, which includes typical hagiographic detail, charts Coplan’s rise from his humble beginnings in a Manhattan apartment building:

Two years after dropping out of NYU with dreams of making it big in the cryptocurrency space, Shane Coplan was so broke that he took inventory of his Lower East Side apartment so he could sell his belongings to pay the rent.

So, to be clear, this is not a rags-to-riches story. After all, in order to attend NYU (gotta love the $60,000 per semester tuition) and/or live in your own apartment in Manhattan, you have to be fairly well off. While the story goes that Coplan was “broke,” it’s worth wondering how he lived in his own apartment. Anyway, let’s put that aside for now. As is typical of Silicon Valley success stories, Coplan decided to leave higher education and become independent, Bloomberg reported. He quickly abandoned his cryptocurrency ambitions, conceived a different business idea, and started working on it:

“This is too good an idea to be in white papers,” he recalls thinking in a subsequent publication about X. Then came Covid — the perfect time to develop an app for people stuck at home to bet on real-world outcomes, he said. He started building Polymarket from his bathroom and launched the platform in June 2020.

Here we get to the most interesting detail to me in the story: Why his bathroom? Wouldn’t a living room work as well? Or his bedroom? Why create an app in a place where people go to shower and relieve themselves? Was he designing Polymarket while sitting on the toilet every morning? Unfortunately, details about this are not readily available. Instead, we get some nice lines about Coplan’s triumphant rise to the Olympic heights of the American economic pyramid:

…He and his company are now riding high after that Intercontinental Exchange Companyowner New York Stock ExchangeHe said he would invest Up to $2 billion in Polymarket at $8 billion pre-money valuation. The deal makes its 27-year-old founder the youngest self-made billionaire tracked by the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

In any case, whatever Coplan’s official financial rating and proper nomenclature, the clear takeaway here is that Polymarket is enjoying a return, and Coplan is reaping its benefits.

Clearly, Polymarket needed to make a comeback because in 2022, the CFTC accused the site of providing 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 no longer operate within the United States in 2023. Despite these promises, the CFTC Open a new investigation On the platform. Then, in 2024, Coplan’s apartment It was raided by the FBI. Later, It has been reported The Ministry of Justice has opened its own investigation into the site.

Since Trump returned to office, Polymarket has performed much better. In July, Bloomberg I mentioned that Management has ended both investigations into the forecasting platform. Not long after that, Polymarket She announced her triumphant return To the United States as part of the acquisition of a financial derivatives exchange and clearing house. In June, the company also… Announced a partnership With Elon Musk’s

Would Coplan have become a billionaire if it weren’t for Donald J. Trump? We will never truly know.