Matt Levine, Columnist

Everything Is Commodities Fraud

Same-raid parlays, a proposed software take-under, Jain Global and an agentic AI hedge fund.

April 27, 2026 at 5:49 PM UTC

Matt Levine is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. A former investment banker at Goldman Sachs, he was a mergers and acquisitions lawyer at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz; a clerk for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit; and an editor of Dealbreaker.

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Imagine if prediction markets had been big in 2011. SEAL Team Six load up in their helicopters to raid Osama Bin Laden’s compound, they check their weapons, pull their night-vision goggles into place, open up their phones and log into Polymarket to buy a few “Osama Bin Laden Captured or Killed By May 31” contracts. They land and shoot him and pause to buy a few more contracts before getting back in the helicopters. By the time they return to headquarters, they are all rich, and news organizations are running headlines like “Polymarket Surge Shows We Likely Got Bin Laden.”

In the last 15 years, the world has gotten dumber in many ways, including this one: