Meet Shayne Coplan, the Gen Z college dropout behind Polymarket

Nearly a year before Donald Trump was elected in 2024, an online prediction market — called Polymarket — offered its users a chance to bet against each other on who would win the presidency. $3.6 billion was wagered on that one question. In the final month of the campaign, most pollsters were saying the race was too close to call. But that was "conventional wisdom." Polymarket relied on the "wisdom of crowds," and correctly predicted the outcome. It's not just elections Polymarket helps its customers bet on. It's all kinds of questions. "Who will win the Super Bowl? Will Taylor Swift get married this year? When will there be a ceasefire in Ukraine?" The company was founded by a precocious college dropout named Shayne Coplan, who started building Polymarket five years ago when he was just 21. Prediction markets aren't new. But not many have earned the backing of billionaire investors like Polymarket has. If it all sounds a bit confounding, it did to us too. So we started by asking Shayne Coplan the most basic question of all: What is Polymarket? Shayne Coplan: It's a site where you can basically bet on current events. Some sort of question about the future, like an election. And as a result, when a ton of people are betting, you get the betting odds, which basically tell you how likely each outcome is. Anderson Cooper: And how accurate is it?Shayne Coplan: It's the most accurate thing we have as mankind right now, until someone else creates some sort of a super crystal ball. Shayne Coplan may be prone to hyperbole, but he is definitely onto something. In the run-up to the 2024 presidential election, while pundits opined and pollsters canvassed, Polymarket posted a simple question for users to put money on: Who will be the "Presidential election winner [in] 2024?" Donald Trump started pulling away in early October.Shayne Coplan: I think one thing that's important to understand about Polymarket is it is not a poll.Anderson Cooper: That's not the function of Polymarket.Shayne Coplan: Correct. Polymarket is trying to predict the outcome. The percentage of people who are gonna vote for a candidate is not the same as who's likely to win. And you would look at Polymarket and it would say 70%-30% for Trump. And people are like, "No way it's gonna be 70%-30%." But he could win by one point, but he's 70% likely to win. Anderson Cooper: Which is a different question than pollsters are askingShayne Coplan: Exactly. But it's the question people actually want to know.Polymarket posted another question months before President Biden's disastrous debate, "Biden drops out of presidential race?" Early on the odds hovered between 10-and 30 percent. Shayne Coplan: The market was pricing it that it was unlikely but that it was possible. And ultimately during the debate the price started skyrocketing.Anderson Cooper: You could watch it during the debate.Shayne Coplan: Exactly. And everyone was talking about it. Anderson Cooper: Because by that point, odds were on Polymarket he's gonna drop out.Shayne Coplan: Exactly. Yes. Send a secure tip to 60 Minutes: Here's how to confidentially share information with our journalistsShayne Coplan: The idea that this was able to go and surface this, at a time when a lot of the mainstream media and like, no knock to mainstream media. But a lot of people were trying to say, "Hey, he's gonna stay in." So the fact that Polymarket was able to be the signal through the noise there was our first step on the scene of mainstream politics. Anderson Cooper: This is the main page for Polymarket?At first glance, the site is a lot to take in. There are 15 categories to choose from, like politics, culture, sports and finance. Within each, there are a lot of boxes with simple questions about an upcoming event.Anderson Cooper: Fed decision, Bolivia presidential election, Russian-Ukraine ceasefire in 2025. How many questions are there at any one time?Shayne Coplan: It usually fluctuates around 10,000.Anderson Cooper: 10,000?Shayne Coplan: But a lot of them have multiple outcomes or multiple variations.Every question has a yes or no answer. To wager, you click on one of them. Shayne Coplan: You make money if you're right. You lose money if you're wrong. And as a result it creates this information that's really useful for people.The percentages next to the questions are the odds, determined by all the other bets that have already been made. As more people wager, and news breaks, the odds change. Anderson Cooper: How do you select the questions? Shayne Coplan: Look, if something is being discussed in the news, if something is of importance, whether it's geopolitically, you know, macroeconomically, culturally, we want to have a Polymarket for it. There are questions or markets to bet on just about everything. Not just Taylor Swift's marriage, but "when will she get pregnant?" How many tweets will Elon Musk send in a week? Anderson Cooper: This is predictions on who will be the top Spotify artist in 2025?Shayne Coplan: Yeah, and the market's very confident it will be Bad Bunny.Some markets are arguably in bad taste. Wagers on conspiracies, even wars.Elections — everywhere however— are one of the platform's biggest draws.Shayne Coplan: Here you go to global elections and you've got the Irish election is just.. Anderson Cooper: There's $135 million being bet on the Irish election?Shayne Coplan: Yeah. When we met with Coplan last month, more than $3.6 million had been wagered on whether or not Venezuela's President Nicolas Maduro would be out of power by the end of the year. Polymarket users didn't think so, they gave it only a 23% chance. Anderson Cooper: And if you buy "no" on that and you're buying it at 78 cents, and at the end of the year he's still in power.Shayne Coplan: Yup. You get a dollar per share. Anderson Cooper: So you've made a profit of?Shayne Coplan: 22 cents per share. Anderson Cooper: I can see why this would be, I mean, I don't want to use the term addictive, but it would be compelling. And maybe it is addictive. I don't know, but it's certainly compelling.Shayne Coplan: Look, this is how I see it. If you are into geopolitics, this creates an incentive for you to dig in to what's going on in Venezuela and try and get an edge.Anderson Cooper: You grew up— the West Side?Shayne Coplan: Uptown, yup.Shayne Coplan is a native New Yorker. He dropped out of NYU his freshman year. And when COVID hit, found himself, looking for simple answers to complex questions. Shayne Coplan: New York City was shut down. And it's like, "When is this gonna end? When's the vaccine gonna be ready? When is shelter in place gonna be over?" And prediction markets can take all these disparate opinions that people are pontificating about or that they have really good reason to believe, and distill it down into one probability.Anderson Cooper: But if nobody knows for sure?Shayne Coplan: Yeah. Well if people knew for sure it would be 100%. But ultimately it's gonna get you something that's better than whatever you're seeing on the internet, where it's just a complete free-for-all of open outcry.Anderson Cooper: But predictive markets do rely on someone having some inside information.Shayne Coplan: Uh-huh. Yeah. I think that people going and having an edge to the market is a good thing. Obviously, you need to curate them and you need to be really clear and stringent on where the line is drawn and, like, sort of ethics and we spend a lot of time on that. But it's sort of an inevitability that this will happen, and there's a lot of benefits from it. And, you know, people will adapt.The site still has critics. Some worry certain questions could lead people to commit crimes to win a big enough bet. Polymarket was criticized for some of their markets about the L.A. wildfires earlier this year. Anderson Cooper: There was a Polymarket bet about how many acres would burn in the L.A. wildfires. Some have labeled it, like arson markets. Someone could, in order to win that, try to burn more acreage.Shayne Coplan: There were a lot of conversations about it and there was a very select few markets that felt that they were the most informational-- with, like, the least sort of, you know, risk. These are really small markets And there's tons of markets. And I understand this is really sensitive.It's the big markets that draw big bettors and this is one of Polymarket's biggest. He's wagered more than $400 million so far. Online he goes by the name Domer. Domer: I don't think of myself as a gambler, right? I mean, I'm taking very, very well-researched views on things. I feel like it's much more akin to investing Betting is Domer's full time job. He said he made nearly $3 million last year on Polymarket. He used to be a professional poker player, but gave it up. Prediction markets, he says, are more exciting.Domer: Everyday I'm kinda going into battle. Anderson Cooper: You wake up. I don't know, drink coffee, and you're, you're in battle.Domer: You are wrong. I look at my phone, within five seconds of waking up. "What have I missed?" My phone is my coffee. What has happened overnight? Yeah, 'cause the news doesn't sleep. Anderson Cooper: Did you bet on the papal conclave?Domer: Yes, for sure.Anderson Cooper: How, I mean, a papal conclave is a hermetically sealed environment. Information does not get out.Domer: Right.Anderson Cooper: Nobody was putting money down that there'd be an American Pope, but you were.Domer: Yeah. And his odds were 250:1. So he was a super, super, super long shot.He won $100,000 on the pope and even more, picking JD Vance to be Donald Trump's running mate. He started betting on him five months before he was selected, when Polymarket was only giving Vance a 2% chance.Anderson Cooper: What did you see that made you think, "Oh, he might pick JD Vance?"Domer: So that goes back to 2016 when he picked Mike Pence. And buried in one of the articles for why he picked Mike Pence is that Mike Pence had a one-syllable name, and Trump has a one-syllable name, and Trump is very into marketing. And so I was looking at the names, and I was like, "Who is one syllable?" And not only is Vance one syllable, he's only two letters off of Pence. Anderson Cooper: So you bet $4,000 and you ended up winning $250,000? Domer: Yes. Yeah.Anderson Cooper: It's a smart play.Domer: It is a good bet, yeah. Shayne Coplan made a risky bet when he built Polymarket in 2020. He did it fast — in just three months — and didn't seek regulatory approval as the law required. His chief competitor, Kalshi, did. In 2021, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission launched an investigation into Polymarket. Coplan cooperated and ultimately paid a penalty. Anderson Cooper: It was a $1.4 million fine and also you-Shayne Coplan: It was a settlement.Anderson Cooper: And you could not have customers in the United States.Shayne Coplan: Yeah, we had to go and geo-block trading in the U.S., and move certain operations offshore. And it wasn't, "Hey, you're banned from trading in the U.S." It's like, "Until you're licensed." Anderson Cooper: I mean, it was breaking the law.Shayne Coplan: I mean, people say breaking the law. It's like which law, you know? So if anything, it's incompatible.Anderson Cooper: It's incompatible with the law.Shayne Coplan: Yeah with the regulatory matrix that existed.The "regulatory matrix" was pretty clear. U.S. customers couldn't trade on Polymarket, but plenty continued to. All they needed was a VPN connection to mask their computer's location. In 2024, in the final weeks of the Biden administration, Coplan got a surprise visit at home from the FBI.Shayne Coplan: There was a lotta, like, yelling and banging on the door. Anderson Cooper: Like, knocking, "This is the FBI"? Or like…Shayne Coplan: No, like a battering ram.He wasn't arrested, but agents seized his phones and computers. But with a new administration, came a new appreciation for prediction markets. In July, the government dropped its investigations, and Polymarket was able to buy a fully licensed, legally compliant trading platform, paving the way for their U.S. customers to bet openly. How a French "whale" made over $80 million on Polymarket betting on Trump's 2024 election winThree months ago, Coplan named Donald Trump Jr. – already an advisor to Kalshi – to Polymarket's advisory board. And Trump Jr.'s 1789 Capital fund invested around $10 million in the company.Anderson Cooper: I think there's gonna be people watching who think, that you've put the president's son on your advisory board to get influence, to be able to protect yourself. Shayne Coplan: So it's definitely not to protect myself. I mean, look. Like, they invested, right? We're in this admin. This admin is very pro-innovation, and pro-crypto, and pro-Polymarket, which is amazing.Anderson Cooper: The administration? Shayne Coplan: Yeah. And, you know, I need help navigating that, right? I'm a young entrepreneur. If I have people who believe in what I do, who understand how politics works and can help me, help guide me and teach me, you know, there's nothing wrong about that.Last month, Polymarket got its biggest validation yet. The company that owns the New York Stock Exchange announced it was investing $2 billion in Polymarket. Days later we met Coplan on the trading floor. Anderson Cooper: What's it like to see your name up to there or to see Polymarket?Shayne Coplan: Yeah, I love it, I love it. It's, it's cool, man.He told us Polymarket's data will soon be integrated into the exchange to help investors and traders get an edge.Anderson Cooper: What valuation now has Polymarket been given?Shayne Coplan: $9 billion post-money valuation.Anderson Cooper: $9 billion. Did you anticipate that?Shayne Coplan: I mean I didn't start it to not get here, you know?Shayne Coplan is now a billionaire, at least on paper. And Polymarket? It still hasn't made any profit. It gives away its main product— its predictions— for free, and doesn't charge fees on trades. At least not yet. Anderson Cooper: How many people use Polymarket today?Shayne Coplan: I mean, there's tens of millions of people who are looking at the odds. And it's-- mid-hundreds of thousands of people who are trading.Anderson Cooper: But for you– the goal is-- a billion people?Shayne Coplan: Yeah.Anderson Cooper: So will Polymarket reach a billion people in five years? Yes or no?Shayne Coplan: Yeah. It's a great question.Anderson Cooper: What are the odds on it?Shayne Coplan: I love it. A billion people is a lot. There's gonna be a lot that we have to get right. The thing that drives me is that there are billions of people who could find value in this, which means until those people have Polymarket, are getting value from Polymarket, job's not done. Produced by Graham Messick. Associate producer, Alex Ortiz. Broadcast associate, Grace Conley. Edited by Michael Mongulla.