Polymarket CEO Shayne Coplan’s social media went silent in the aftermath of a dawn raid on his Manhattan penthouse late in 2024. FBI agents came in force early one Wednesday morning, and though they hadn’t arrested Coplan or even issued a subpoena, they did seize his phone. His laptop, too.
As the then-26-year-old would later learn, the raid was part of a high-level investigation into his company. A prediction market platform allowing users to gamble on real-life events, Polymarket wasn’t cleared for use by US citizens, though that didn’t stop them from placing prop bets on the presidential election anyway — a fact federal regulators believed Coplan was keenly aware of.
Finally, at 4pm the day of the raid, Coplan issued his much-awaited statement on X-formerly-Twitter: “new phone, who dis?”
What looked like just another smarmy startup founder was actually a perfect pitch for Polymarket’s core audience: people who believe regulation is for losers, and that pithy tech bros are the funniest guys in the world.
And whether calculated or compulsive, Coplan’s public persona was about to become central to Polymarket’s story.
Ruling like a petty tyrant from the company’s headquarters in lower Manhattan, Coplan isn’t an easy boss to work with, according to new reporting by the Wall Street Journal. The 20-something CEO is said to frequently holler at his employees, and occasionally shows up to company Zoom calls shirtless.
At first, “a lot of people wouldn’t invest because they thought Shayne was nuts,” Polymarket investor Samir Vasavada told the WSJ. “It was to an extreme the amount he believed in himself.”
However put off investors may have been as Coplan got a taste for the founders’ life, it didn’t stop Polymarket from ballooning into an $8 billion company, or its CEO becoming the youngest billionaire on earth. Aided by the Trump administration’s dismissal of two federal probes — including the one that sent FBI agents to bust down his door — not to mention a handsome investment from Donald Trump Jr. himself, the company is now a dominant player in America’s fast-growing gambling industry.
And as Coplan’s net worth has gone through the stratosphere, so too has his confidence, taking his ambitions far beyond the confines of the humble crypto casino. Per the WSJ, Coplan envisions a Polymarket with billions of users, one where anonymous bookies inform government policy and become the go-to source to fact check information.
“The vision that I know that my team and I want to build has not come to life fully yet,” he told the paper. “We still have a long way to go.”
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