Sylvie Andrews and her associate didn’t simply lose the brand new home they’d helped construct when the Eaton Fireplace ripped by Altadena, California, in January 2025. They misplaced a complete decade’s price of sacrifices they’d made to place down roots of their hometown, and the group they’d created. “We put a whole lot of blood, sweat, and tears into it,” Andrews stated. “That’s what we misplaced within the hearth.”
That fireside, together with the Palisades Fireplace to the west, destroyed greater than 16,000 buildings and killed 31 individuals. However whereas Andrews and 1000’s of Angelenos had been racing to evacuate, different individuals noticed a monetary alternative. Utilizing Polymarket, the world’s largest prediction market platform, they made bets on the fires—how they’d develop, how lengthy they’d final, and the way a lot they’d destroy.
Prediction markets are basically playing web sites the place individuals wager on the result of occasions, together with elections, sports activities, the climate, and extra. Something is truthful recreation, from oil costs and the unfold of infectious illnesses to worldwide incidents. Markets often body questions in a “sure” or “no” style, with the value of a “contract” fluctuating between $0 and $1. A value of fifty cents on a “sure” contract signifies that the individuals doing the betting collectively imagine the occasion has a 50 % probability of occurring. Market hosts make cash by charging a charge on wagers.
In January 2025, Polymarket listed nearly 20 questions, created by the platform’s “markets staff,” associated to the wildfires burning up Southern California. What number of acres will the Palisades Fireplace burn by Friday, three days after it ignited on a Tuesday? Will the Palisades Fireplace attain Santa Monica by Sunday? When will the Palisades hearth be 50 % contained? Will the Palisades and Eaton fires be contained earlier than February?
Individuals spent $1.2 million betting on these queries, in response to Aeon Journal. “Wow,” Andrews stated repeatedly when she discovered the determine. “My first take is that it’s morally reprehensible,” she stated. “The truth that somebody would really feel OK doing that flabbergasts me.”
“The prediction markets are simply the wild, wild West,” stated Susan Sherman, who grew up in Pacific Palisades. She misplaced her childhood house within the Palisades Fireplace; her late mother and father had owned it since 1963, and now it was gone. She bought the empty lot just a few months in the past. “I take a look at (betting on the fires) as simply being very crass and heartless.”
As prediction markets growth and a brand new wildfire season begins, hearth survivors and ethicists say that the betting encourages and rewards callous pondering—and harmful habits.
One main concern stemming from wildfire prediction markets is arson. “That’s what has me nervous,” Sherman stated. Theoretically, betting might give somebody the perverse incentive to begin a hearth or assist one develop. Not like different disasters, reminiscent of hurricanes, flooding, or excessive warmth, a hearth will be manipulated in minutes by only one individual. “Programs that tie monetary acquire to wildfire outcomes danger encouraging misuse, together with arson, and are usually not suitable with our mission,” a spokesperson for the US Forest Service stated.
“Think about what a foul actor would possibly do,” stated Ann Skeet, the senior director of management ethics on the Markkula Middle for Utilized Ethics at Santa Clara College. “A market that may help that sort of exercise, I believe, is a harmful market.” Firefighters or land managers with unique details about a hearth’s habits or an company’s firefighting plans might even be tempted to wager on a hearth, which might be thought-about insider buying and selling.
