The total open interest of all major prediction markets is barely over a billion dollars. (1) That's the total amount of money currently wagered on ALL contracts across all platforms.

There are roughly 2,500 individual companies listed in the US alone with a market cap that exceeds 1 billion dollars. Tesla's market cap is 1.4 trillion - about 1,000 times the size of all prediction markets put together.

In other words, to the extent this incentive is of societal concern, it is not because of prediction markets - that is the tail wagging the dog.

Edit: to be clear I think these markets are a scourge as they currently operate, but not for this reason.

(1) https://predik.io/en/blog/open-interest-mercados-prediccion-...

Assassination markets where being discussed back in the 1990s.[1] I think it's been pretty clear for a while that "prediction" markets were going to arrive at the same place.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_market

This hypothetical situation had existed since the dawn of capital markets, or at least since the dawn of short selling. I don’t think we’ve ever seen anyone get assassinated to make a short bet pay off though.

In a sense, that's already happened. https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/kalshi-sued-over-o... and https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/apr/18/iran-war-bets-...

> Later, a single user would make over $550,000 after betting that Ayatollah Ali Khamenei would topple, just moments before his assassination by Israeli forces.

Don’t even need a gambling marketplace for that - could already put a massive short on TSLA and have a pop at Elon if you were so motivated.

That has proven not to be the case with sports betting. Otherwise every major league pitcher would be needing armed guards to stop all the people with pipes trying to disable them. Seems there is at least some morality to not harm people but no issue in harming temperature sensors so where is the split line? Some really annoying ones like trains being on time can impact thousands yet i could see someone stepping out on tracks to make a train break to delay it to win a bet

Not sure that he has done wonders for Tesla sales over the last few years, and he collected enemies quicker than most.

> Just wait until they start killing people to win bets.

Quite likely it has already happened.

There's been an enormous amount of betting on various military strikes by the Trump administration, much of which looks like insider trading.

Almost certainly there have been insiders with money on the line who were financially motivated to launch lethal attacks, which they might have otherwise paused or delayed.