Did White House insiders bet on the Iran war?

War, it is often said, has no real winners. Or at least that used to be the case. In 2026, though, it turns out that a small number of people with access to privileged information can do very well indeed out of geopolitical conflict.

While much of the world was watching the US and Israel launch strikes on Iran with trepidation, a select few were celebrating big payouts. Over on prediction markets like Polymarket, on the day preceding the assault, over 150 enterprising punters had bet at least $1,000 on the US attacking Iran by the end of Saturday.

With nearly a million dollars wagered, gains ranged from tens of thousands to, for one person, just under $500k. You don’t need to be an ordnance manufacturer to make bank from bombings – you just need a crypto wallet and a little bit of insider knowledge.

A quick primer for those not yet familiar with the magical world of prediction markets. Put simply, they’re marketplaces for yes/no contracts on real-world events.

Instead of betting against a bookie, you trade with other participants, and the “odds” are just the current price, often read as a rough probability. If “Yes” is trading at $0.20, the market is saying there’s about a 20% chance of the event taking place; if new information convinces traders it’s more likely, the price can rise.

Markets can exist on literally anything, from politics to penalty kicks. For insight into the dizzying range and pace of the bets being placed, real sickos can visit a website called PolyGlobe, which shows a realtime map of speculation on everything from whether Trump will say the words “black plastic” in a statement in the week commencing 8th March, to the outcome of Denmark’s forthcoming elections.

As to who’s making these bets… nobody knows! Prediction markets mainly operate through crypto wallets, meaning the identity of those taking positions on things like “is a sovereign state going to declare surprise war on another sovereign state?” is hard, if not impossible, to determine.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, this has led to speculation that many of them are White House insiders taking the opportunity to pad their pension (or, potentially, legal) funds.

It’s not the first time the Trump administration has been suspected of insider trading. While the US “extraction” of Nicolas Maduro on 3 January came as a surprise to many, one enterprising trader, whose account had only been created days earlier, placed a number of bets on the Venezuelan leader not lasting the month.

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Getting in just hours before the US commenced its incursion, they were able to buy low and make over $400k in profits. Rumours that this was the famously-online Barron Trump proved sadly impossible to verify.

Lest you be concerned that we are living in an entirely post-morality world, though, you can rest assured that there are some limits to what one can bet on.

The CEO of Kalshi, another prediction market where bets were placed on Khamenei being “out” as Iranian leader, recently posted on X that “We don’t list markets directly tied to death… When there are markets where potential outcomes involve death, we design the rules to prevent people from profiting from death”.

Exactly how an 86 year old leader with no desire to step aside was going to be “out” without dying is… unclear. Meanwhile, Polymarket has removed an attempt to create a market based on when exactly the first nuclear warhead is set to be detonated in the Third World War.

Should you be in the UK and in possession of privileged information and would like to use it to screw some rubes out of a few quid, you’re officially out of luck. Technically-speaking Polymarket and Kalshi – the two biggest players – aren’t available to users in the UK.

In reality, though, a combination of crypto and VPNs mean that it’s not hard to get involved if you’re motivated. As I type, multiple traders in the City of London are speculating as to whether the Bank of England is going to alter interest rates later this month (and a couple of people in Westminster are trading on whether Keir Starmer will still be prime minister by April 30).

There is something undeniably very now about prediction markets which suggests that they will continue growing in popularity. When the world feels febrile, jagged and beyond your control, why not just try and make a few additional quid from the madness. YOLO, after all, and that stockpile of Huel for the nuclear bunker won’t pay for itself.