I truly don't know how you wake up, read this story with your morning coffee, and go to work at a company like this.
There's nothing wrong with a prediction market. There are a lot of reasons why they're helpful in judging the probability of future events more accurately than any single analyst, and are therefore a net benefit to society, no different from newspapers and stock markets.
These are just individuals making criminal threats. They're the bad guys here. They don't work for Polymarket or anything. Your comment is like saying you can't imagine how anyone could go to work at the Olympics after Nancy Kerrigan got struck by Tonya Harding's ex-husband. Something criminal happened, but the Olypmics are not the one responsible.
Answer this and I think you'll discover that "no different" is actually quite different.
Regarding the stock market: nobody sane uses the stock market as an indicator for the future. People predict the stock market, not the other way around.
I don't have the slightest idea what point you're trying to make with this. Journalists make lots of people unhappy with their reporting, if you're referring to risks to journalists? Indeed that's part of the job of being a truth teller.
> nobody sane uses the stock market as an indicator for the future
I don't think you understand. If you think you can do a better job of predicting the future than the stock market, you will become extremely wealthy. So how exactly do you think it isn't basically the best publicly available indicator of the future, specifically the net present value of future expected profits?
Sophisticated analysts absolutely use current stock prices/market value for modeling the future.
> I don't think you understand. [...]
I don't think you understand. Let's imagine a scenario: the market valuation of NVIDIA is high and has been trending up YTD, with some sizeable dips every couple of weeks. What does that tell you about the future?
Let's imagine another scenario. The odds on Polymarket of GPT-5.5 releasing in April just jumped from 40% to 95%. What does that tell you about the future?
You can try to derive information out of a stock market price, but it is not a prediction tool. The newspaper and Polymarket are more directly comparable in the context of prediction tools, because they both tell you exactly what they predict.
The risks of the stock market are closer to the risks of Polymarket (and the former has tons of regulations for obvious reasons, as demonstrated in the article), but the function is completely different.
> What does that tell you about the future?
Are these supposed to be trick questions or something? They tell you exactly what they tell you. I already told you -- the stock price is a prediction of NPV of future profits. Did you see that in my last comment? Do you understand that? If that isn't a concrete, actionable and valuable prediction, I don't know what is.
1) “I believe in what we’re doing as a mostly positive force in the world”
2) “Eh, the money is good”
Probably the same way FB people feel, probably the same way Palantir people feel, etc etc