Betting on Venezuela
What Next
Slate Podcasts
4.6 • 2.3K Ratings
🗓️ 9 January 2026
⏱️ 27 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
While the U.S. was busy capturing Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, someone online was busy placing bets on prediction markets on the ouster. And these well-timed bets may have netted a still-anonymous someone more than $400,000. Was this a case of kind-of-legal insider trading? Or is America going all-out on its efforts to make everything a casino?
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Transcript
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| 1:04.5 | Just before 11 p.m. Eastern Time on January 2nd, President Trump orders the military to go into Caracas and get Nicholas Maduro. |
| 1:16.1 | That's late contributor, Alex Kirchner. And you know that part of the story already. |
| 1:21.3 | And around 1 a.m. Eastern time the next morning, the third, there are explosions heard in Venezuela. And a little while |
| 1:30.1 | after that, basically while a lot of people are sleeping in the United States, Trump announces that |
| 1:35.4 | the U.S. has Maduro in custody. But before that, something was happening online. Between December 27th and in particular with a concentration |
| 1:46.8 | earlier in the evening and earlier in the day on January 2nd, there's this traitor. |
| 1:54.6 | The T-R-A-D-E-R kind. |
| 1:58.6 | Whose name we don't know, whose identity is completely mysterious to us, who logs into |
| 2:05.2 | Polymarket, the prediction market platform, and just piles up bets, which can almost be traded |
| 2:12.5 | like stocks on Polymarket, that by January 31st, Nicholas Maduro will be out of power. |
| 2:20.8 | January 31st, 2026. |
| 2:23.1 | 26, correct. |
| 2:24.8 | There are a few different bets here with slightly different wording. |
... |
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