Here’s Robinhood’s CEO Vlad Tenev, one of the leading profiteers from America’s financial nihilism: “I like to think about prediction markets as the next generation of the news. Prediction markets were so confident that Trump would beat Harris that they made traditional newspapers, which saw the race as a toss up, look like they were waffling. A great deal of volume in prediction markets is sports betting, though predictions markets mechanically work slightly differently than straight sports bets. As media critic Matt Pearce points out, there’s a problem of incentives: ethical journalists cannot pay sources, but prediction markets do. Prediction markets, on the other hand, make their money through transaction fees — and thus through volume.