Polymarket took $1.2 million in wildfire bets during the 2025 LA fires. Nine Democratic senators gave the CFTC until today to shut such markets down — but Polymarket delisted them in January 2025, and the platform is now raising at a $20 billion valuation.

During the January 2025 Palisades and Eaton fires — 31 dead, more than 30,000 acres burned — bettors wagered more than $1.2 million on Polymarket contracts tied to the disaster: acreage burned, whether the fire would reach Santa Monica, whether an arsonist would be arrested. That figure comes from a Washington Post report published Aug. 12 by reporter Cole Reynolds, and it is the number worth holding onto as an SFGATE column this week recycles the outrage.

Nine Democratic senators — led by Martin Heinrich of New Mexico, and including California's Alex Padilla and Adam Schiff — sent the Commodity Futures Trading Commission an Aug. 3 letter demanding it bar wildfire betting, per ABC7. They set a response deadline of today, Aug. 14. "You never want to encourage the obscene act of starting a fire," Sen. Jeff Merkley told the Post.

Here is what the wire coverage buries: the markets they want removed do not exist. Polymarket's last wildfire contract closed Jan. 31, 2025, on its unregulated international platform — not a CFTC-regulated venue — and neither Polymarket nor Kalshi has listed a new one since, according to CNN and casinobeats. Kalshi bars them outright over arson incentives, though it still trades earthquakes and hurricanes.

The cap-table reality the moral framing skips: Polymarket is not a fringe operation. It closed an April 2026 round at a roughly $15 billion valuation with D.E. Shaw, and was in talks in early August to raise about $1 billion at $20 billion-plus, per CNBC and Bloomberg. Its largest backer is Intercontinental Exchange, the owner of the New York Stock Exchange, which has committed up to $2 billion. Annualized revenue has topped $1.2 billion.

Watch two things: whether the CFTC — which invoked emergency authority Aug 11 to keep Kalshi running through a New York lawsuit — answers the letter today, and whether any platform relists a wildfire market as the Bug, Big Sur and Humboldt County fires burn now. As of this week, none had.