Shayne Coplan, the 27-year-old founder of Polymarket, has been crowned the world’s youngest self-made billionaire. Coplan, a New York University dropout, earned the distinction after the owner of the New York Stock Exchange, Intercontinental Exchange Inc., invested $2 billion into the platform. Coplan’s billionaire status comes less than a year after the FBI raided his New York City apartment in the aftermath of the 2024 election, which saw Polymarket users bet over $3 billion on the outcome. Regulators suspected that some users in the U.S. were using the site despite a 2022 ban. Coplan launched the prediction market in June 2020 after starting to build it in his apartment’s bathroom. The platform, which allows users to bet on anything from a football game to who will win the Nobel Peace Prize, has been able to avoid bans on sports gambling since it sells products tied to outcomes rather than sports bets. The market, whose US relaunch is being delayed by the government shutdown, already has investors such as Peter Thiel, Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin, and 1789 Capital, which had Donald Trump Jr. join as an adviser.
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