An interesting wager
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Alan Cole put his life savings, all $342,195.63, into a prediction-market wager. He insists he’s not really a betting man.
Cole is a 37-year-old tax economist with Ivy League degrees, a mortgage and a young child. 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.
WSJ:
