Last month, as American forces gathered in the Middle East in obvious preparation for an attack on Iran, you could’ve made a small fortune gambling on when exactly the bombing would begin.
One user on the prediction site Polymarket — where you can wager on an increasingly large share of human events, from the trivial to the tragic — made $553,000 on bets placed right before Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, was killed by U.S.-Israeli strikes. Another user was quickly flagged by observers on X as having made $2.14 million by placing bets on different aspects of the military operation.
In another context, these bets would trigger an insider-trading investigation, and indeed someone in the Iranian military might well have treated the bets as a form of actionable intelligence.
