Greed is not Good

At a forum in the fall of 2025, the CEO of the ‘prediction market’ platform Kalshi said, “The long-term vision is to financialize everything.”

Why?

His intervention echoed the famous words of Gordon Gekko in Oliver Stone’s landmark film Wall Street, voiced by Michael Douglas:

“The point is, ladies and gentlemen, that greed – for lack of a better word – is good.  Greed is right.  Greed works.  Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit.  Greed, in all of its forms – greed for life, for money, for love, knowledge – has marked the upward surge of mankind.”

What is a prediction market? While based on some statistical grounding and with use cases like hedging, insurance, and information transparency, today, it has become a dressed-up term for people placing bets on random events – gambling. Like other forms of gambling, it is ultimately a form of predation on the poorest in society. 

The rise of Kalshi, Polymarket, and other so-called prediction markets has come alongside an explosion in online sports betting. Platforms such as DraftKings and FanDuel are not sideshows; through partnerships with professional leagues, they are the main attraction. 

It is estimated that Americans wagered $150 billion on sports in 2024. With prediction markets unlocking the ‘financialization’ of everything, it will not be long before Americans will be betting on everything in large numbers. As a loosely regulated marketplace, insider trading is rampant, and commercial cartelization increasingly treats retail betters as gambling fodder. 

 The house also wins. The house is not the founders put on display. In our tribal society, it is progress as long as those doing the winning share our tribal markers. The headlines about Kashi raising $1 billion in a Series E instantly focused on one female founder under 30 becoming a billionaire and the other founder being an immigrant person of color. Greed, however, has always been race-blind, color-blind, and blind in general to broader societal impacts. 

The real house, of course, is the trillionaires. The trillion-dollar funds, the trillion-dollar asset managers, the trillion-dollar collectives. And soon, individual trillionaires. Today, the top 1% of Americans hold over $52 trillion in wealth. In a time of ubiquitous social media and inter-class navel-gazing, visible inequality has never been so stark. It is not sustainable. 

Major investors in prediction markets and sports gambling include Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, and Founders Fund. Many members of the house speak about the transformative power of artificial intelligence or the liberating technology of decentralization, only to double down on livelihood extraction. Is this why the world needs trillion-dollar data centers? 

Conflating greed with capitalism is a mistake. Greed is not capitalism. It is the manipulation of capitalism to exploit all others by any means necessary for personal gain. When individuals fail to distinguish between the two, they easily start to believe that greed is good and that any innovation driven by greed must also lead to good outcomes. 

Unlimited money printing papers over the fact that many people get rich without creating anything of value. The optics of dollar wealth mask the hollowness of what was created. Not everyone is Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, or Elon Musk; even if you hate those individuals, they have created value-driven enterprises (other arguments can be had around corporate practices). But the tech world offers the mirage that all founders are builders of value. That is not true. 

The negative impacts of overall financialization are hard to attribute to one company, but there is direct societal harm from the rise in sports betting and prediction markets. The surge in gambling addiction is already reaching epidemic levels, contributing to rising suicide rates in some segments. If the 2010s were defined by opioid abuse for middle America, the 2020s may be remembered for gambling devastation. 

As platforms grow, with higher and higher stakes, it will lead to hidden pressures on real-world events, from sports to politics, to determine an outcome. When the incentives to win are too great, the consequences could be dire.

Due to technology and free markets, the power to succeed and ‘make it’ is more possible today than ever before. But wealth accumulation has reached obscene levels through the manipulation of these forces. Those at the top of the leaderboard are part of gated deals that leave the rest behind. And that excess capital is now being deployed to hit those at the bottom even harder.  

You can still be a responsible capitalist without being a communist. You can still be a responsible accelerationist without being a Luddite. 

You can still say without shame: 

Greed is not good.