Tax nerd bets his life savings against Elon Musk and wins
A tax economist from Washington staked everything on a simple conviction that Elon Musk could not beat basic arithmetic
Alan Cole is not the sort of person you would expect to find in a casino. He holds Ivy League degrees and has a mortgage. But last year, Cole placed every dollar of his life's savings into a prediction market wager.
All $342,195 — and he did it with the confidence of a man who had already done the math.
The target of his bet was Elon Musk. Specifically, Musk's Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which arrived in Washington promising to slash federal spending with the force of a Silicon Valley disruption. The prediction markets lit up. Musk believers poured money into wagers that spending would fall.
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Cole took the other side.
He is a 37-year-old tax economist at the right-leaning Tax Foundation. His usual world is international corporate taxation. He is, by his own description, a normal person. But he had spent enough time around federal budgets to know something the Musk enthusiasts apparently did not.
The United States government is, as he put it, essentially an insurance company with an army, social security, medicare, and interest payments on a national debt approaching 100% of GDP.
These forces push spending upward every single year. No amount of contract-cutting changes that arithmetic.
According to the Wall Street Journal, which first reported the story, Cole structured his position carefully across several sub-bets on the Kalshi website. He needed only one thing to happen: for the government to keep being the government.
It did. Last month, the final figures arrived. Cole walked away with $470,300. That amounts to a 37% profit.
