Elon’s X Gets Into Bed With Polymarket to Fe...

Elon Musk’s X (formerly Twitter) has announced a new corporate partnership that, all things considered, makes a lot of sense. The social media site says that it will team up with Polymarket, the Peter Thiel-backed “prediction” platform that allows web users to earn or burn cash via bets on everything from the outcome of political races to mysterious farts to the existence of space aliens.

X announced the partnership in a simple tweet on Friday: “We’re joining forces with Polymarket as our official prediction market partner,” the company said. Polymarket, meanwhile, published a press release with (slightly) more information about what was happening and why.

“Combining Polymarket’s accurate, unbiased, and real-time prediction market probabilities with Grok’s analysis and X’s real-time insights will enable us to provide contextualized, data-driven insights to millions of Polymarket users around the world instantaneously,” said Shayne Coplan, the founder and CEO of Polymarket, in the press release. “We look forward to enhancing X and Polymarket users’ ability to make instant sense of breaking news and make informed decisions about the future as we continue to scale our platform.”

There isn’t a whole lot of information about the partnership other than that, nor is there a great sense of how it will benefit both sites—though it’d be easy to guess. Polymarket integration with X clearly affords the former a wider potential audience and, rich as X is in inane debates about a whole variety of dubious cultural and political topics, plenty of fodder for bettors with too little sense and too much cash to burn. For X, meanwhile, it’s just one more weird addition to keep the site’s cruising altitude at a decidedly unhinged pitch. People guess what’s going to happen about some random subject while Grok guesses at what the next letter in a sentence would provide a satisfying inquiry.

Polymarket has partnered with several different platforms over the last few years, including Substack and the AI firm Perplexity. Its partnership with X may make the most sense. Musk has transformed the site formerly known as Twitter into a vortex of bad information—a place where disinformation, infotainment, blatant propaganda, and news all walk hand in hand. Polymarket, meanwhile, has been the subject of ample criticism, with some accusing the platform of being a den of market manipulation. Relatedly, Polymarket is just a barometer for user sentiment, not any sort of crystal ball. In other words: two sites with less-than-stellar reputations have joined forces to bring you a union of dubious content, and as we all know, dubious content is where the money’s at, as far as Silicon Valley is concerned.