26 Feb 2026 3:35 pm
The retards on this site insisted Musk was "taking a giant axe" and "gutting" the Beast so Grover Norquist could drown it in a bathtub...Blackvegetable » 26 Feb 2026, 3:20 pm » wrote: ↑ Alan Cole put his life savings, all $342,195.63, into a prediction-market wager. … Until Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency came roaring into the nation’s capital last year, he was largely a plain-vanilla investor or, as he puts it, a “normal, conventional Wall Street Journal-reading adult.”
But Musk’s boasts and his eager fans brought an unusual opportunity into the burgeoning U.S. prediction markets: People willing to bet that the world’s richest man would transform and shrink the federal government.
Cole took the opposite position, one he didn’t see as a gamble at all. If federal spending in each quarter of 2025 exceeded federal spending in the fourth quarter of 2024, he would win big. …
From Cole’s perspective, even if Musk cut government contracts and shrank the federal workforce—which he did—he couldn’t meaningfully dent Social Security and Medicare benefits. And that left no plausible path for cutting overall federal spending. ...
The key feature of the prediction market offered on the Kalshi website was that it measured federal spending in annualized, seasonally adjusted nominal dollars. To win, Cole didn’t need spending to stay above a past projection. He just needed federal spending to go up, as it almost always does.
He made like $128,000, or 37%. Notice the features of this product:
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/newsletters/2026-02-26/the-doge-doubt-trade?cmpid=BBD022626_MONEYSTUFF&utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter&utm_term=260226&utm_campaign=moneystuff