Fuckery Week

Turning the page to a new year is often a chance for resetting, out with the old, in with the new. In the case of 2026, it's sure starting with a whole bunch of the same, only more brazenly disgusting. In our second Fuckery Week installment, we'll discuss entirely new achievements in insider trading that might go pretty much all the way up.

For those unfamiliar, Polymarket is an online prediction market that allows users to buy shares in binary (yes/no) time-based outcomes and get paid (or lose out) depending upon what actually happens. For example, right now, you can buy shares in Will Silver (SI) hit $90/oz by end of January? for 23 cents each. If Silver does hit $90 before the end of the month, you get $1/share, so in this case it's basically a bet at 4-1 odds.

In addition to bets on economic outcomes, Polymarket users can participate in markets for sports, cultural events, technology, really anything that you can turn into a binary. Including nation-state hostility.

Which brings us to today's fuckery.

On our about January 1, someone opened an account on Polymarket. The account placed a series of bets related to Venezuelan political events, including a $32,000 on "yes" at $0.07 to the question, "Maduro out by January 31, 2026."

A couple of days later, that account recorded a profit of $409,882 and subsequently withdrew it into a Coinbase account (some of the proceeds were subsequently used to buy Fartcoin tokens - that is not a joke).

In the interest of fairness, it is possible that this was a hugely coincidental and very lucky wager by someone who had a hunch. Possible. Also possible that I could tackle Derrick Henry in the open field.

Naturally, something like this would be likely to draw attention. Just so. An X user named Andrew GWEI 10 posted the following series of Tweets:

TL;DR version: an account that seems to be linked to domains that appear to be associated with Steven Charles Witkoff's corporation profited handsomely from an extremely well-timed bet on something a Trump insider might plausibly know. To be sure, "seems to be", "appear to be", "might plausibly know" don't meet any sort of evidentiary standard - this is something my attorneys suggested I should include. But would you put this sort of fuckery beyond the assholes running the country?

The Witkoff in question (Presidential advisor Steve) has been seen on Air Force One with the President in recent days, and would be in a position to know if something were planned in Venezuela, given his access to Trump. 

Complicating matters legally (there's no moral ambivalence to be found here - if the circumstantial evidence points to something real, this is disgusting profiteering), there's no clear law against using insider knowledge to participate in prediction markets. Many reputable markets say they try to vet trades to mitigate insider risks, but that doesn't seem to have happened in this case.

If anyone with prior knowledge of the Maduro operation used that information to profit, it's yet one more sign of the ethical bankruptcy of our national leadership. I bet one couldn't get very good odds on that "if" turning into a negative.