Jul 22, 2026
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Three years ago, Polymarket was a company Americans weren’t legally allowed to touch. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission fined it $1.4 million, forced it to wind down its U.S. markets and left it operating as an offshore curiosity. To use it, you needed a VPN and a willingness to skirt the rules.
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Today, the company holds a federal license, counts the New York Stock Exchange’s parent company among its backers and was reportedly valued at $15 billion in a funding round this spring.
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Somewhere in between, an investment firm co-run by Donald Trump Jr. bought a stake at a $300 million valuation, according to a New York Times investigation published July 21.
By the Times’s math, that’s roughly a 50-fold paper gain. The license that reopened Polymarket to the U.S. market came from a CFTC now led by a Trump appointee.
Donald Trump Jr. says he has no inside information and doesn’t need any. The betting platform at the center of it all is now open to Americans for the first time in years, making it worth understanding before putting any money into it.
How a banned betting site became a $15 billion company
Polymarket’s problems with Washington started in January 2022, when the Commodity Futures Trading Commission fined the platform $1.4 million for running an unregistered exchange and ordered it to wind down its non-compliant markets. The company continued growing overseas, and its election markets became a fixation during the 2024 campaign, but its biggest potential customer base remained shut out.
The turnaround happened in stages, all during the second Trump administration. In July 2025, Polymarket paid $112 million for QCEX, a derivatives exchange and clearinghouse that held a CFTC license. That same month, a CFTC investigation into the company was dropped without charges. Then, on November 25, the CFTC cleared Polymarket to operate as a fully regulated U.S. platform.
Investors responded, and big money followed. Intercontinental Exchange, the NYSE’s parent, committed up to $2 billion, including a $600 million tranche completed in March. By April, reports had Polymarket seeking another $400 million at a valuation of about $15 billion.
The Times reports that 1789 Capital, the venture firm where Trump Jr. is a partner. No stake was specified, but whatever it’s worth, it has multiplied many times over since a Trump-era regulator opened the door.
Moneywise reached out to Polymarket to confirm its valuation history and the timeline of its US relaunch; the company had not responded by publication.
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A two-year-old firm managing $3.5 billion
1789 Capital was founded in Palm Beach, Florida, in 2022 by Omeed Malik, a former Bank of America managing director who once raised money for Hillary Clinton.
Trump Jr. joined as a partner days after his father won re-election in November 2024, when the firm managed a few hundred million dollars.
The firm’s growth since then has been extraordinary by any venture standard. Paul Abrahimzadeh, a partner at the firm, told the Financial Times in May that 1789 now manages about $3.5 billion, and roughly 40% of that money comes from foreign investors whose locations aren’t disclosed, per SEC filings.
The firm’s main fund had returned roughly 200% as of June 30, compared with about 21% for the average venture firm started in 2023, citing PitchBook data.
Angela Lee, who teaches venture capital at Columbia Business School, told the Times she had never seen first-time fund managers raise money at this pace.
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“People are paying for proximity to power,” she said.
The pattern beyond Polymarket
The rest of the portfolio makes the Polymarket bet look less like a lucky draw. The Times reports 1789 holds stakes in SpaceX, Anduril, Cerebras, the defense manufacturer Hadrian and Axiom Space — companies whose business lines line up with the administration’s drive to reshore defense manufacturing and critical-mineral supply chains away from China.
The deal drawing congressional attention involves Vulcan Elements, a rare-earths magnet maker. According to the Times, 1789 invested last fall at a valuation near $200 million. A few months later the company received a $620 million loan commitment from the Defense Department, and it’s now worth about $2 billion. Democrats on the House Natural Resources Committee are examining whether the firm played any role in the loan decision.
Malik’s account, per the Times, is that the loan wasn’t on his radar when 1789 bought in — he says he found out about it the way anyone could have, from a Vulcan Elements announcement that went out afterward. Trump Jr. said he has never met or spoken with anyone at the company, that he talks to his father only every few weeks and never about business. “I don’t have inside information,” he said.
The remarks from Trump Jr. and Malik above were made to the Times, not to Moneywise; 1789 Capital had not responded to Moneywise’s own request for comment by publication.
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Jessica Tillipman, who studies government procurement law at George Washington University, makes the point that the rulebook here is mostly unwritten. Few hard laws govern how a president’s grown children invest. What restrained past first families was custom, and custom only binds people who feel bound by it.
The part that’s now open to everyone
Polymarket, which made 1789 Capital its money, is live in 49 states in the U.S. You buy contracts on questions with a yes-or-no answer, like whether the Fed cuts rates in March or who wins a Senate race. A winning $1 contract pays a dollar, and a losing one pays nothing, though you can sell out before the result is in.
The same Polymarket platform is also under criminal scrutiny. Some of Polymarket’s most heavily traded markets are geopolitical, and they have drawn serious legal trouble. In February, Israeli authorities arrested and charged two people, one of them a military reservist, for allegedly using classified information to bet that Israel would strike Iran. It was the first criminal case tied to insider trading on a prediction market.
Around those same strikes, anonymous wallets funded days earlier made large profits, including one that turned about $61,000 into $493,000. The CFTC, the same regulator whose license reopened Polymarket to Americans, is now reviewing whether some of these markets paid out on leaked military intelligence.
1789 Capital bought into all of this before the app existed and before the scrutiny. The company is now reportedly worth $15 billion. The retail traders showing up to bet a few dollars are arriving after the gain was made, on a platform still working out its own rules.
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Godwin Oluponmile is a content specialist, SEO strategist and copywriter with seven years of expertise in finance, Web 3.0, B2B SaaS and technology. His work has been featured in publications such as Entrepreneur, HackerNoon, Blocktelegraph and Benzinga.
