Hey, everybody. It's me, Sam Stein, managing editor at The Bullwark. I'm joined by Ben Parker and

Sunny Bunch. We're here to talk about gambling, Kalshi, Elon Musk, how to make easy money,

how to make dumb money. Guys, thanks for doing this. So what sparked our interest this morning was

a Wall Street journal piece, which was kind of amazing in a way. Basically, I'm going to try to

summarize it, but Sonny will do the full scope of it. Some guy, some tax nerd here in Washington,

D.C., really understood that Elon Musk was a fraud when he started Doge and that the money we

spend will not go down because we have these things called entitlement programs that the federal government has to spend money on and they grow bigger and bigger. And Elon Musk wasn't going to touch it. And so he put his entire life savings into the prediction markets saying that we will not, in fact, spend less money at the end of the year. And lo and behold, he was a big winner. Sonny, did I get that right? More or less, yeah. I mean, Alan Cole's a guy who works at the Tax Foundation, right-of-center organization. It's not like he's, you know, radical lib like us at the bulwark, right? He's doing, he's doing, he's doing, you know, kind of write-a-center

tax stuff. And when Elon was like, yes, I'm going to come in and we're going to slash, we're going to get rid of all the fraud, we're going to slash the spending. He was like, no, you're not. That's ridiculous. Nobody's ever going to slash the spending. That's never going to happen. And so he pulled all of his money out of, you know, regular stocks and put it in this.

He did not. He made it very close. never going to happen. And so he pulled all of his money out of, you know, the regular stocks

and put it in this. He did not, he made it very clear. He did not literally bet the house. Okay. The equity stayed in the house and he, you know, so it wasn't, we wasn't going to be homeless if he, if he lost this. But, you know, I'm sure, I'm sure he really had to have good chat with his wife. Like, look, this is, what you have to understand is money always go up in federal government.

Like, money always go up, never go down. And so I can't possibly lose. And sure enough, he was right.

He even he even hedged the bets in such a way that, like, even if there was a $50 billion reduction in spending,

which again, possible, he still would have won.

He still would have been in the black.

Yeah.

What were the actual contours of the bet?

It was that the, I'm just trying to make sure I understand this.

If federal spending, the ridds, if federal spending in each quarter of 2025 exceeded federal spending in the fourth quarter of 2020, 2020, he wins. So that's the bet.

It's like each quarter has to be a little bit higher than it was in the fourth quarter of 24.

And Ben, Ben, you made the point, you made the point in Slack that whoever wrote this did a terrible job.

Whoever wrote the contract for this did a terrible job.

Because, okay, a few details here that are important.

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