Is the Founder of Polymarket Really the Youngest Self-Made Billionaire?

Polymarket, the popular prediction market, has been doing really well lately. In fact, it’s been doing so well that Bloomberg is out with a new story that claims the site’s founder, Shayne Coplan, is officially America’s youngest “self-made billionaire,” a term which is quite confusing.

To review, Coplan’s newfound riches are the result of a recent business deal with the owner of the New York Stock Exchange, who has promised to invest billions in the 27-year-old’s company. As such, Coplan has managed to become Silicon Valley’s latest success story, and he is now worthy of a write-up about his supposedly meritocratic rise to fame and fortune. Indeed, Bloomberg’s story, which includes the typical hagiographical details, charts Coplan’s rise from his modest beginnings in a Manhattan apartment building:

A couple of years after dropping out of New York University with dreams of making it big in crypto, Shayne Coplan was so broke that he took an inventory of his Lower East Side apartment so that he could sell belongings to make rent.

So, to be clear, this isn’t exactly a rags-to-riches story. After all, to even be attending NYU (gotta love that $60k-per-semester tuition) and/or living in your own apartment in Manhattan, you have to be fairly well off. And while the story says that Coplan was “broke,” it’s worth wondering how he was living in his own apartment. Anyway, let’s set that aside for the moment. As is canonical in the typical Silicon Valley success stories, Coplan decided to drop out of higher education and go it on his own, Bloomberg reports. He soon ditched his crypto ambitions and conceived of a different business idea, and hit the ground running with it:

“This is too good of an idea to just exist in whitepapers,” he recalled thinking in a later post on X. Then Covid struck — the perfect time to develop an app for stuck-at-home folks to bet on real-world outcomes, he reasoned. He began building Polymarket from his bathroom and launched the platform in June 2020.

Here we arrive at the most interesting detail of the story for me: Why his bathroom? Wouldn’t the living room have worked just as well? Or his bedroom? Why construct an app in a place where people go to bathe and relieve themselves? Was he designing Polymarket while sitting on the toilet every morning? Unfortunately, the details on this are not readily available. Instead, we just get some nice sentences about Coplan’s victorious ascension to the Olympian heights of America’s economic pyramid:

…he and his company are now riding high after Intercontinental Exchange Inc., the owner of the New York Stock Exchange, said it would invest as much as $2 billion in Polymarket at an $8 billion pre-money valuation. That deal makes its 27-year-old founder the youngest self-made billionaire tracked by the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

At any rate, whatever Coplan’s official financial ranking and its appropriate designation, the clear takeaway here is that Polymarket is enjoying a comeback, and Coplan is reaping the benefits of it.

Polymarket obviously needed a comeback because, in 2022, the Commodities Futures Trading Commission accused the site of having offered 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 not operate inside the U.S. In 2023, despite these promises, the CFTC opened a new probe into the platform. Then, in 2024, Coplan’s apartment was raided by the FBI. Later, it was reported that the DOJ had opened its own investigation into the site.

Ever since Trump returned to office, Polymarket has fared significantly better. In July, Bloomberg reported that the administration had ended both probes into the prediction platform. Not long afterward, Polymarket announced its victorious return to the U.S. as part of a deal to acquire a derivatives exchange and a clearinghouse. In June, the company had also announced a partnership with Elon Musk’s X (formerly Twitter), which Coplan said would allow his platform to “provide contextualized, data-driven insights to millions of Polymarket users around the world instantaneously.”

Would Coplan have ever been a billionaire if not for one Donald J. Trump? We’ll never truly know.