Author
Julia Smith
Author
Julia Smith
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27-year-old Polymarket founder Shayne Coplan has officially become the youngest self-made billionaire, a new report from Bloomberg claims.
Polymarket Founder Lands Self-Made Billionaire Status
The report officially dubs the New York University (NYU) dropout as the youngest self-made billionaire amid Polymarket’s $9 billion valuation by the New York Stock Exchange’s parent organization, Intercontinental Exchange (ICE), as part of its $2 billion investment in Coplan’s company.
“By combining ICE’s institutional scale and credibility with Polymarket’s consumer savvy, we will be able to deliver world-class products for the modern investor,” Coplan said in an October 7 statement.
“Realizing the potential of new technologies, such as tokenization, will require collaboration between established market leaders and next-generation innovators,” he added. “We couldn’t be more excited to build together.”
Feds Clear Shayne Coplan Probe
News of Polymarket’s financial success comes just one year after the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) raided Coplan’s home amid increased political scrutiny of the decentralized prediction market.
In August 2024, a coalition of Democratic lawmakers pressed the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) to ban political betting markets.
“Election gambling fundamentally cheapens the sanctity of our democratic process,” the letter reads. “Political bets change the motivations behind each vote, replacing political convictions with financial calculations.”
“Allowing billionaires to wager extraordinary bets while simultaneously contributing to a specific candidate or party, and political insiders to bet on elections using non-public information, will further degrade public trust in the electoral process,” the U.S. lawmakers continued.
In July 2025, federal authorities sent letters to Coplan announcing they had closed their probe into the blockchain-based betting market.
“After cooperating and engaging, we’ve been cleared of any wrongdoing. Justice prevailed,” Coplan said in a July 15 X post. “God Bless America.”
With federal investigations seemingly behind Coplan, his new billionaire status reflects the growing appetite for emerging financial technology.
