Blood for stonks

On December 31st, a brand-new account on Polymarket placed a bet: Nicolás Maduro, the leader of Venezuela, would be out of office by the end of January. It was the first in a series of increasing bets. On January 3rd, the US bombed the Venezuelan capital, kidnapped Maduro and his wife, and killed at least 80 people along the way. The account cashed out with almost half a million dollars.

It would be a misread to describe the surprise invasion of Venezuela as imperial expansion driven by the dictates of capitalism; it is, somehow, worse. Normal capitalism requires a working relationship with reality. Normal capitalism thrives on predictability. The Trump administration is behaving like gambling addicts chasing clout in an attention economy. Venezuela is a fucking meme stock.

Then there’s Donald Trump saying he consulted oil companies on the invasion — but the same execs are denying that they knew. In Trump’s defense, a Politico report quotes an anonymous petroleum “industry official” saying that there had been an “offer” from the administration on the table for 10 days prior to the attack on Caracas. “They’re saying, ‘you gotta go in if you want to play and get reimbursed.’” But the oil companies, according to the insider, are awfully ambivalent about an entire sovereign nation being annexed to their supposed benefit — “the infrastructure currently there is so dilapidated that no one at these companies can adequately assess what is needed to make it operable.” Another source said that overtures from the Trump administration had been “relatively flatly received” by the industry.

America produces the most ghoulish capitalists in the world, and not even they want this. The oil companies are leery about Venezuela because they are aware that the oil there is sour crude, which “requires significant refining” — in other words, complex and expensive infrastructure rather than the decades-old shambles that’s there.

We have now arrived at the logical end state of financial nihilism. Meme stocks are sentiment only; whatever happens to the underlying company is irrelevant at best to what happens with the stock price. And despite the death toll, this administration is treating the war on Venezuela as all sentiment, in-jokes, and degen memes. That’s why the war room (war nook?) is just a big TV screen of X.com and war profiteering now consists of Polymarket bets.

This is Wag the Dog staged by idiots who have themselves gotten confused about the difference between image and reality. Real people are dead because a number of powerful people in the US live in a sadistic fantasy, chasing a gambler’s high.

Perhaps you are thinking, “Surely it cannot be legal to suddenly bomb a country, kidnap its head of state, and annex it? All in the dead of night? Surely not?” If such doubts are running through your mind, you’re in good company — in its judgment in the Nuremberg trials, the tribunal declared that a war of aggression “is the supreme international crime, differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.”

As with all meme stocks, enthusiasm for the Venezuela operation exists in an echo chamber. YouGov polling in the wake of the bombing says that more Americans disapprove than approve of Trump’s handling of Venezuela; in the lead-up, support for military action was “scant.” But a lot of very powerful people have had their brains completely cooked by the rogue internet forum known as X, and can’t even tell how out of touch they are.

A tiny fraction of world leaders expressed their wholehearted approval for the Venezuela operation, and they mostly went to X’s echo chamber to do it. “To all the narco chavista criminals, your time is coming. Your structure will completely collapse across the entire continent,” posted Ecuador’s President Daniel Noboa. “Congratulations, President @realDonaldTrump for your bold and historic leadership on behalf of freedom and justice,” posted Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is currently wanted by the International Criminal Court for war crimes.

In contrast, when Colombia’s President Gustavo Petro took to X right after the bombings to express “deep concern” and Colombia’s “commitment” to the UN Charter, he was met with trolling, including from platform owner Elon Musk. Musk has spent the last few days reposting crypto influencers praising the war in Venezuela, including a post by @WallStreetApes with a video that is tagged as AI generated and misleading.

Knowing all this clarifies why an anonymous “centrist House Democrat” might tell Axios that “if you don’t acknowledge when there is a win for our country, then you lose all credibility,” saying they were surprised at “how negative the response has been” from other Democrats. This is not consistent with actual polling. Americans at large do not like the Venezuela operation, but maybe more relevantly for a Democratic politician, Democrats really don’t like it. Being “surprised” here is terminal X brain; these are the words of someone who has been infected by the same brainworm as the White House.

Rubio, on the other hand, has spent the last few days insisting that there’s no war, that “this wasn’t an invasion,” that the US is merely going to be “running policy” in Venezuela rather than actually “run” it, and that Maduro “was an illegitimate leader.” These are the mealy-mouthed sophistries of someone who is aware of international law, and is desperately threading the needle.

This is with good reason. Regardless of the deranged, insular fandom of X.com, most of the rest of the world is very much not on board. After the initial bombings, a number of countries across the world released carefully phrased official statements. Leaders called for “respect” for international law (Peru, Canada, Denmark, the European Commission) or reiterated their own recognition of international law (Bolivia, Germany, the United Kingdom, Japan, Malaysia, Singapore).

Other countries refused to mince words. A joint statement by Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, Uruguay, and Spain stated that “the military actions carried out unilaterally in the territory of Venezuela … contravene fundamental principles of international law.” And when France’s Emmanuel Macron omitted mention of international law in his official statement (on X), other French officials rushed out to flatly emphasize that the Venezuela operation violated international law.

Meanwhile, Argentinian president and crypto hypeman Javier Milei went on a posting bender, excitedly reposting anyone criticizing international law, boosting claims that the international legal regime did not care about Maduro’s own tyrannical acts while he was in power.

This would probably be news to Maduro, as there is an ongoing probe into human rights violations alleged to have taken place as far back as 2014 in Venezuela, shortly after he first took power. Just two weeks before Caracas was bombed and Maduro was kidnapped, the Venezuelan government made an earnest attempt to withdraw from the Rome Statute, the treaty that binds its signatories to the authority — as well as protection — of the International Criminal Court. It’s not a terrible leap to assume that Maduro and his allies thought the ICC might be coming for him, and that they had better make like George W. Bush and extract themselves from the strictures of international law — just the sort of idea that appeals to all war criminals right up until the war crimes are done unto them.

What Trump has done in Venezuela is much bigger than the Rome Statute and specific atrocities it encompasses. It was not enough to set fire to the US Constitution; Trump is now setting fire to the UN Charter, too. If Trump is allowed to unilaterally declare Maduro’s illegitimacy and spirit him away in the night, then “that’s the end of international law, that’s the end of the U.N. charter, that’s the end of any kind of legal limits on the use of force,” as Yale Law School professor and international law scholar Oona Hathaway told The New Yorker’s Isaac Chotiner.

Anyone with a passing familiarity with US history is surely aware of the “not-wars” that the US has been doing for decades, especially in Latin America, where the greatest hits include the CIA assist of the 1973 Chilean coup d’état, the Iran-Contra affair in Nicaragua, and kidnapping General Manuel Noriega to force a regime change in Panama. (All three of these occurred in previous Republican administrations — Nixon, Reagan, and George H.W. Bush, respectively.) But scholars agree that this is different, and that Maduro’s head-of-state immunity is no small detail. Even the interim leader of Venezuela, recognized by Trump, said Maduro is the country’s “only president” after she was sworn in.

The difference between now and then is far from academic. Our mad king has now taken to threatening other nations: Denmark (over Greenland), Mexico, Cuba, and Colombia. It seems he believes that if the US kidnaps a head of state, the US now runs that state.

But not even this Sid Meier’s Civilization view of the world can fully explain why things went down as they did. When the Trump administration kidnapped the Maduros, it was a serious geopolitical action that seemed engineered primarily to play on X. And X is indeed where it played out. The action makes the most sense if we assume the primary purpose of the Maduro kidnapping was to generate content. After all, US forces could simply have assassinated him. Instead, there will be more images of Maduro to release — including the perp walk. We learned this lesson over the course of the Forever Wars: There are plenty of images, content, and memes from the arrest of Saddam Hussein. By contrast, the murder of Osama bin Laden generated very little beyond conspiracy theories and a single photograph of President Barack Obama, Secretary Hillary Clinton, and others in the Situation Room.

The Trump administration even tried to engineer their own Situation Room photo, releasing black-and-white images of themselves in what appeared to be a makeshift sensitive compartmented information facility created by use of, uh, what appeared to be blackout curtains.

But the X bubble’s addiction to content demanded more. Not satisfied with a real Maduro perp walk video, AI-generated images of fake perp walks flooded the platform. AI-generated videos of Venezuelans celebrating made the rounds. And the White House X account went so far as to post its own version of “Mission accomplished”: an obviously AI Trump scowling into the camera and ascending toward the viewer, captioned “FAFO,” an initialism for “fuck around and find out.”

This is the inevitable endpoint of terminal X brain. Well before the Venezuela bombings, Trump has heavily relied on AI to communicate with his supporters, including in ways that are likely to conflate fake videos and reality. The platform is rife with people treating signifiers as reality with their heavy use of AI. No representation of an actual event is needed to rile up the masses. The world is not that which is the case, the world is that which is content.

In 1953, B.F. Skinner — best known for changing the field of psychology forever by mindfucking a bunch of hapless pigeons — described “the pathological gambler” as “the victim of an unpredictable contingency of reinforcement,” akin to a pigeon contorting itself endlessly in the hopes of receiving unpredictable rewards. There is an argument made by some economists and Nate Silver that prediction markets are useful ways of telling the future because they let you know what smart people are willing to wager on. But these economists (pigeons) and Nate Silver (also a pigeon) haven’t accounted for the obvious: Being smart means getting treatment for your gambling addiction, not figuring out fun new ways to bet.

When high-risk, high-payout bets on Polymarket or Kalshi have anything to do with reality, it is likely due to insider trading.

Take, for instance, the account that won more than $1 million by placing bets on Google’s 2025 Year in Search rankings — getting 22 of 23 predictions right. That account’s other trades also revolved around Google, and in November, the account won $150,000 by correctly predicting the day that Google’s Gemini 3.0 would launch. It is possible, though unlikely, that someone simply has remarkably good intuition about what’s going on internally at Google. The obvious answer is that an insider got themselves a bonus.

Some people have argued that this is good, actually — because it means information becomes public faster. “If your goal, for 99 percent of people, is to get a signal about what’s happening in the world, you actually want insider information,” said Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong at the NYT DealBook Summit. Why anyone might want to provide liquidity to a market that is stacked against them isn’t made clear. (The answer is that gambling is addictive, and casinos need pigeons.) Nor is it clear that this is the most effective way to make information public. But Armstrong effectively runs a gambling platform, so his incentives are, you know, to promote gambling.

It is not difficult to see how prediction markets create other kinds of perverse incentives. One question on Kalshi as of this writing involves the number of measles cases this year. A possible outcome is someone betting on “above 10,000” and then unleashing biological warfare. Another is “When will Tim Cook leave Apple?” — a question that can be effectively resolved via murder. (The ’90s dream of assassination markets is alive and well on the blockchain!) Sports gambling at least limits such cheating to athletes throwing games; prediction markets’ questions such as “how far will a California wildfire spread” can be influenced by gamblers aiding the fires or hindering efforts to suppress them. All of these hypotheticals make Ukraine war misinformation seem positively benign.

In the case of Maduro, it’s not clear how widespread the information about the kidnapping was before it occurred. Perhaps Trump is telling the truth, and he did consult oil companies before the operation — in which case, an oil exec (or their assistant) might have made the bet. But if that information was restricted to the Trump administration, the picture gets much worse. That official would have had financial incentive to kidnap Maduro even if it were not in the best interests of the US as a whole. That is the pinnacle of financial nihilism — gambling markets setting political policy. Instead of Blood for Oil, we have Blood for Stonks.

One reason it is nearly impossible for Kalshi or Polymarket to do anything about such trades is that these markets are effectively anonymous. There is no “know your consumer” protocol, and no way to enforce a policy against insider trading, even if the prediction market had one. Polymarket does not, and its CEO, Shayne Coplan, has called insider trading “cool.” Currently, the company is busy denying that the kidnapping of a head of state amounts to an invasion, refusing to pay out on one of its prediction contracts unless the US military controls part or all of Venezuela.

Divorcing the real-world outcomes from the hype machine effectively makes Venezuela a meme stock, complete with a mechanism for gambling in the form of prediction markets. And the X hype machine is operating in exactly the same way it does for meme stocks and crypto, acting to pump up the legitimacy of the operation with a fire hose of jokes, misinformation, and in-group shibboleths. It’s no wonder that the likes of Elon Musk and Javier Milei are furiously posting and reposting in support of the Venezuela operation; these are men who are particularly prone to boosterism for financial flim-flam, whether it’s dogecoin or Libra. Posting through this is second nature.

As of this writing, there is now a Polymarket bet on whether the US will make another strike on Venezuela, as well as “US strike on Colombia by...?” and “Will Trump acquire Greenland before 2027?” While it is a little funny to imagine the heads of various intelligence services monitoring outlier bets on Kalshi and Polymarket to find out whether the Trump administration really plans to invade Greenland, it also suggests that America’s political apparatus is riddled with gambling-addled Kim Philbys. People have been leaking secrets on War Thunder forums for online cred for years now. What happens when there’s real money at stake?

It won’t matter that economic analysis by the government of Greenland concluded that oil drilling would “either deliver low profits or make a loss.” It won’t matter that it is “unclear” whether mining for the rare earth metals under its ice is even “economically viable,” due to the complexity of processing those minerals, not to mention the pervasive lack of transportation infrastructure. It won’t matter that invading Greenland would explode NATO, sending the entire global economy into a tailspin. Polymarket will still pay out, assuming you are sufficiently careful about the definition of little words like “invasion.”

In the alternate reality constructed by keyboard sycophants, crypto influencers, and Grok, Trump has won a war and is running an enthusiastic, cheering Venezuela. But though Maduro is now in US custody, the regime has not actually changed. Maduro’s own vice president, Delcy Rodríguez, has taken over the country as interim leader with Trump’s approval. Francisco Santos Calderón, Colombia’s former vice president, has accused Rodríguez of orchestrating an inside job: “I’m absolutely certain Delcy Rodríguez handed him over. All the information we have, you start to put it together and say: ‘Oh, this was an operation in which they handed him over.’”

Whatever happened behind the scenes, the de facto result approximates the outcome of a coup d’état, giving the lie to the hype about liberating Venezuela from an illegitimate leader. In 2024, Edmundo González ran for president in place of opposition leader María Corina Machado, who had been banned from appearing on the ballot. González almost certainly won that election, and did so as a reflection of popular support for Machado. (Right after the bombing of Caracas, Polymarket betting on whether Machado would be recognized as the new leader spiked upward.) But Trump apparently resents Machado for winning the Nobel Peace Prize and has no intention of having her or González take office. In a recent Fox News interview, Machado offered to share her Nobel with Trump, marking a new nadir in the embarrassing history of the Peace Prize; Polymarket now rates her chances at about 1 percent.

Meanwhile, shortly after taking the reins, Rodríguez gave a speech on television saying “we will never return to being the colony of another empire.” This prompted Trump to respond with a wild threat: “If she doesn’t do what’s right, she is going to pay a very big price, probably bigger than Maduro.”

Even on the face of it, Trump’s fantasy is absurd: How, for instance, will the US “run” Venezuela when it has no troops or diplomats in the country? Much to Trump’s chagrin, Rodríguez is breaking kayfabe — probably because she lives in the real Venezuela and has to deal with real Venezuelans.

Maybe that’s why Trump is sliding back into what he knows best: bribery and extortion. Recently, in a Truth Social post, he announced that “the Interim Authorities in Venezuela will be turning over between 30 and 50 MILLION Barrels of High Quality, Sanctioned Oil to the United States of America.” The oil will be sold, and any proceeds “will be controlled by me, the President of the United States of America.” Can’t wait to see how Congress, the legislative body that theoretically controls the nation’s purse strings, will respond to this. Perhaps they will confirm another cabinet member.

Meme stocks run on hype, self-deception, and deregulation, and because of their very nature — hollow, nihilistic financial instruments dressed up as jokes — the majority of people who participate wind up losers. The action in Venezuela is destined to end in American humiliation, one way or another. The only real question is how much it will cost us, in lost lives and in broken alliances, before we realize all our apes gone.

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