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Elon Musk is constantly making promises, usually made on underwhelming earnings calls as a way to assuage investors and artificially juice stock prices with lofty pitches of what the future holds. Well, if you’re willing to trust the notoriously shady prediction markets that have at times refused to pay out for dubious reasons, you too can turn Musk’s bullshit into gold. NBC News reports that Musk has become a popular target of prediction market bettors, with folks turning profits from betting against Musk’s promises coming true.
You won’t be early to the betting against Musk game. But if you can’t be first, you can at least be right. According to NBC News, one Polymarket “whale,” currently sitting just outside the top 50 in all-time profits on the platform, has made a nice chunk of his winnings by betting against Musk and Tesla in particular. He’s placed 12 bets against them in total, with over $36,000 on the line. He reportedly just recently pocketed a 10% return on a $10,000 bet that Musk wouldn’t start a new American political party despite threatening to do so after a feud with President Donald Trump.
You’ll note that 10% return isn’t as big as you might imagine—though it does still beat most of the APR available on checking or savings accounts. That’s because, despite the rabid fanboys that are happy to go to bat for every little thing Musk says on Twitter, there aren’t many who are willing to put their money where their mouth is. For instance, despite Musk claiming that he might buy Irish budget airline Ryanair after getting into a spat with its CEO, Kalshi currently has the likelihood of Musk following through on that threat at just 14%.
Of course, a few bets against Musk’s predictions with a 10% return rate can add up real quick. And he certainly puts plenty of bullshit out there for you to bet against.
Just a few weeks ago, he claimed that his company, xAI, would achieve artificial general intelligence by the end of 2026. You can pretty safely assume that won’t happen—most of the AI industry has moved away from using AGI as a metric, likely because LLMs alone won’t be able to reach that level of breakthrough. There is also a litany of bets you could make against his promises related to autonomous driving and robotics. Don’t think his humanoid robot Optimus will really be publicly available by 2027? Have doubts that Tesla will ramp up its Robotaxi service (which, currently, can barely operate more than a dozen vehicles at the same time) to become a nationwide service by the end of the year? That could be some easy money.
Of course, there is plenty of reason to proceed with caution regarding these bets. First and foremost, prediction markets are not regulated the way other gambling platforms are, and there’s a non-zero chance they’ll just decide not to resolve a market on a technicality. And then there is the market manipulation that happens. Musk himself has tried to get in on this. Last year, he encouraged people to bet that his company would launch its Robotaxi service to the public before July, calling it a “money-making opportunity.” It did launch in June, but only to a select subset of people and not the general public, which cost his backers their bets. All the more reason to take the opposite side of any prediction Musk makes.
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