Google executive makes a fortune overnight through insider trading, raking in a million dollars

Author: Liu Kaiwen

The hottest Polymarket event this week is undoubtedly the sensational market "Who will be the number one person in Google's annual search ranking in 2025?" Since the market opened, Pope Leo XIV has consistently held the top position, with a probability stabilizing around 50%; meanwhile, globally recognized figures like Trump, Taylor Swift, and Musk occupy the narrative center of the entire market—this should have been a list contested by "celebrities."

The vast majority of traders have never seriously looked at the nearly zero-weight options at the bottom of the market: Mikey Madison, Andy Byron, d4vd… Their presence seems to merely enrich the odds table, and no one would genuinely consider them as potential winners.

The "Dumb Big Player" Going Against the Trend

A week ago, when everyone was focused on the fluctuations of these star options, one address (0xafEe) began to buy a large amount of "d4vd = Yes" positions at an extremely low price. In prediction markets, price equals probability—at that time, d4vd's probability was not only very low but almost negligible.

To outsiders, this was just an insignificant "lottery position": options with a long-term probability close to zero can yield dozens of times returns if the probability rises to 10%. That trader invested only $20,000 in this position, while his historical trading volume was nearly ten million dollars, making the "lottery position" theory even more convincing.

The truly bizarre actions occurred a week later.

With no knowledge of when Google would release the trending search list, this trader suddenly began to build a large position the day before yesterday. He was not buying "Yes" for popular figures but was aggressively sweeping up their "No."

Pope Leo XIV, Trump, Taylor Swift, the newly elected mayor of New York… all options deemed "likely to win" by the market were negated by him with millions of dollars in real cash.

This operation, devoid of any hedging logic and ignoring price impact, completely defied the trading logic of whales and didn't even resemble normal investment behavior. Some in the market began to notice this contrarian big player, but more people just regarded him as a "fool with too much money."

Astonishing Market Reversal

However, just hours after he finished his buying spree, Google suddenly released the annual trending search list. At the moment the rankings were announced, the entire market was collectively stunned—the top was neither the Pope nor Trump, nor any of the popular options, but that name with a long-term probability close to zero, which the trader couldn't even be bothered to research: d4vd.

The market exploded in an instant. Within seconds, d4vd's probability shot up vertically from the bottom of the chart to 99.9%, and all other options were instantly cleared. While the market was still trying to understand whether this was a bug in Google's system, someone had already noticed: that trader who had been "randomly operating" made over a million dollars in profit in a single day.

He won with "d4vd = Yes," yielding nearly 20 times returns. All his "popular figures = No" bets also won.

As people continued to scroll through his positions, they found that he also won all bets in another nearly identical market "Top 5 Google Annual Trending People in 2025," with nearly $500,000 invested across ten positions, yielding a floating profit of $292,000. He also participated in seven markets regarding the release date of the new version of Gemini, investing over $1 million, and still made a profit across the board.

In other words, as long as it was related to Google, he seemed to have never bet wrong.

More Terrifying than Insider Trading: The "Rewriter"

As people began to characterize this incident as Google employees profiting from insider information, deeper on-chain tracking pushed this event into a more unsettling direction. Analysis showed that the trader's address was adorableraccoon.eth, and according to on-chain records, he had staked over $15 million in ETH on Aave before November 4.

With on-chain assets exceeding $15 million, this is clearly not the wealth level of an ordinary Google employee. Increasing signs indicate that this person is likely not just an ordinary engineer but a senior executive deeply embedded in Google's core system, possibly with decision-making power.

This raises a more dangerous question: What if he not only knew the results in advance but could also manipulate them?

Google's annual trending search list is not solely determined by total search volume but relies on a set of internal algorithms highly sensitive to instantaneous search surges. Theoretically, as long as one understands the parameters, weights, and thresholds of the algorithm, they can easily push a name to "rise" in the rankings. For a truly authorized Google executive, making a name explode to the top is not an impossible task. Within this framework, prediction markets are not merely tools for forecasting the future but can be used by certain individuals to create future arbitrage instruments through a hidden decision-making chain.

If this high-ranking Google executive indeed possesses the ability to control the algorithm, then all prediction markets related to Google are not just channels for him to profit from information asymmetry; if he wishes, he could even "fine-tune" the world line, steering it in the direction most favorable to himself.

Conclusion

A person with core decision-making power has publicly demonstrated for the first time in the open market that he can transform prediction markets from "settlement platforms for information asymmetry" into "tools for altering reality."

Prediction markets have always been viewed as a mechanism driven by collective wisdom to reverse-engineer the truth; in this incident, it was first proven that they could be used by certain individuals with system privileges to manipulate the world line.

He is betting not just on the future but on the future he can create.