Polymarket’s every move is under close scrutiny these days as the prediction market giant fights dozens of legal battles about how it can operate. But one hiring decision has remained under the radar: Late last year, Polymarket brought on former Department of Government Efficiency affiliate Jonathan Mendelson as a senior strategic executive.
Before his stint at Elon Musk’s DOGE, Mendelson worked as an investor for the venture capital firm Accel, which invests in technology companies, in San Francisco. At DOGE, Mendelson was technically employed by the General Services Administration but worked as an adviser to Securities and Exchange Commission chairman Paul Atkins. Mendelson was there for less than a year. Polymarket, which currently faces an investigation from the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, declined to comment for this story. The SEC did not respond to requests for comment.
Mendelson isn’t the only former DOGE affiliate in a position of power in a prediction market. Elie Mishory, a former CFTC regulator who helped develop the agency’s framework for prediction markets, worked as Kalshi’s general counsel and chief regulatory officer in 2025 before stepping down to lead DOGE’s efforts at the SEC, where he worked with Mendelson. In June, he took a role as the chief regulatory and legal affairs officer at Novig, a newer, well-funded sports-focused prediction market. “Elie has been at the center of the most consequential regulatory developments in prediction markets—he helped bring them from a fringe idea to the center of the national conversation,” Jacob Fortinsky, Novig’s cofounder and chief executive, said in a statement announcing his hire.
Mishory tells WIRED that joining a prediction market company was a “natural dovetail” from his mission at the SEC for DOGE. There, he says he prioritized talking to staffers about how to streamline operations, and then tried to implement their suggestions on how to change administrative processes or get rid of redundant software. He was quick to note that his experience at DOGE was “atypical,” in part because he didn’t focus on cutting staff. (The SEC did lose 18 percent of its staff in 2025; unlike DOGE-ravaged agencies like the United States Agency for International Development, most of the cuts were voluntary buyouts.)
“My version of DOGE was to find the people who were the experts,” he says. “The people who actually used the software, not just the people who would buy the software, to give them a voice.” In Mishory’s eyes, this resembles the way that prediction markets “democratize” knowledge by rewarding people according to how well they perform. He also sees overlap in the appetite for risk in both DOGE and in prediction markets. Indeed, the way that DOGE brought on young, inexperienced engineers to remake the federal government mirrors how many of the big prediction market companies, including Polymarket and Novig, are steered by twentysomethings with thin résumés.
These hires have been made at a tumultuous, politically charged moment for the industry. As prediction markets have exploded in popularity, many state regulators and federal lawmakers are calling for stricter guardrails on how they operate, arguing that they facilitate corruption and violate state gambling laws.
In many ways, the industry represents the zenith of the strain of startup culture that valorizes speed in a quest to remake institutions, while regulators struggle to keep up. Although many detractors say prediction markets’ offerings are sports betting products in disguise, the leaders of these companies aim to compete with the world’s largest commodities and futures markets. They have found allies within the Trump administration—Donald Trump Jr. is an adviser to both Polymarket and Kalshi, and the Trump family–owned social media company, Truth Social, has a marketing collaboration with Crypto.com’s prediction market offering.
