Bettors at one point gave an over 60 percent chance of Trump mentioning digital assets during the interview
Aug 12, 2024 at 10:58 p.m. EDT Updated Aug 13, 2024 at 1:11 a.m. EDT
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- An interview between Elon Musk and Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump attracted over 1 million listeners on X.
- Crypto was not mentioned during the two-hour long event.
Former President Donald Trump did not mention bitcoin (BTC) or crypto during an interview with X CEO Elon Musk on Monday evening.
Over two hours, the wide-ranging interview covered a variety of topics including illegal immigration, the economy, AI and global warming.
The interview attracted over 1 million listeners and was delayed for over 45 mins, due to what Musk called a “massive [distributed denial of service] attack on X”.
“As this massive attack illustrates, there’s a lot of opposition to people just hearing what President Trump has to say,” Musk said of the alleged attack.
A report from The Verge called this into question, however, with a source telling the publication that this wasn’t the case, saying there was a “99 percent chance Musk was lying” about the attack. An alert from cybersecurity watchdog organization Netblocks said X Spaces was experiencing international outages but did not confirm if it was a DDOS attack.
On Polymarket, bettors were giving a 65 percent chance of “crypto” being mentioned during the interview, with over $600,000 staked on the topic. The prediction market also added another market to ask bettors about the possibility of “bitcoin” being mentioned, which peaked at 69% with approximately $330,000 on the table.
Each share pays out $1 in USDC, a stablecoin, or cryptocurrency that trades at par with the U.S. dollar, if the prediction comes true, and zero if not.
Polymarket did not list out markets for mentions of other digital assets such as ether, solana, or dogecoin.
Bettors had punted over $250,000 on Trump mentioning “Tesla,” which peaked at 79%, however Trump dodged the specific word by referring to the electric vehicle brand from Musk as “your cars.”
Other words that bettors had punted on, which Trump ended up saying on X space, included “MAGA,” “illegal immigrant,” and “tampon.”
One user by the name of ‘bama1234‘ walked away with just over $1 million for betting correctly on most of the words Trump did or did not say during the interview.
Of all the words, their largest stake was in Trump not saying “crypto”, which led him to cash out $336,918.
The user did not correctly bet on Trump saying “MAGA” during the interview, which Trump said early on, or “Trans,” which the user thought Trump would say, but the Republican candidate did not in the end.
While crypto has become an election issue, with Trump appearing at recent BTC 2024 conference in Nashville to announce crypto policy, it continues to go unmentioned during mainstream events such as the first presidential debate in June.
Edited by Kevin Reynolds.
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