OK, let's go (#1518289).

I finished it... with a healthy amount of skimming through the middle.

All the standard characters are included in this tale of terror that Mr. Goodwin and Ms. Webb weave for us:

• DARPA
• Israeli intelligence
• Palatir, Thiel, Elon Musk, Facebook, Zuckerberg, Parker
• 9/11 conspiracy
• Epstein
• Shitcoins
• Dodd-Frank act

I dunno, man, it's KIND OF ridiculous

The best TL;DR for their story comes at the end:

The story has been carefully crafted over the past few years that a young college drop-out named Shayne Coplan, after being inspired by Austrian economists and Robin Hanson, founded Polymarket in mid-2020 completely alone and then “built his company in his bathroom.” As detailed extensively in this article, there is plenty of background information and key data points that have been clearly left out of this story in order for this particular narrative of Shayne Coplan’s and Polymarket’s origins to take hold.

and:

In the case of Coplan, despite efforts made to obfuscate his past, he was clearly immersed in networks within the cryptocurrency agency with ties to Israel and Israeli intelligence well before he founded Polymarket.
[...]
exposing the truth behind the world’s most popular prediction market and its dark ambitions to alter both markets and representative government forever

You can stop reading here and surmise the rest of the article. I strongly suggest you spend an hour of your life doing something (anything!) else.

Now, if you do want to torture yourself, let me first state: I like Mark and Whitney, and appreciate the voice of independent journalism and anti-establishment stuff.
Plus, the thoooousands of hours they’ve plunged into this is incredible. The research and write-up behind this article in particular warrants a lot more than quick, witty sarcasm from Den.

...But even if you spend a ton of time and effort on an important topic, if you come to it with the wrong vision, the end result is still mostly trash. (Seb Bunney knows a thing about that, #1516456; as does Sven Beckert whose massive book I’ve struggled to make progress in #1416952, #1434507, #1426621)

Webb and Goodwin's story is a typical money-flows-indicate-nefarious-villain stuff story, with the authors tracking down all manner of sunny-in-Philadelphia type connections.

aside: I also love that, let’s pretend evil little schmucks are set to nefariously take over the world, that they’d be silly and vain enough to leave tiny little clues in the logos of the markets and organizations they create! Ah, perhaps a worthy internet sleuth/opponent can emerge!

The most astonishing one is the longshot of some political aspect of the rich owners or some company that funded a crucial researcher (later!) – and it's even better if they did something bad, or were involved in a financial crash or scandal of some sort: Epstein, GFC, S&L crash, DARPA. See, see! they yell all excited, thinking they found a smoking gun or unveiled something. Fifteen paragraphs later, when nobody is paying attention anymore, they confess:

"...his efforts to legalize “real money” prediction markets alongside Howard Lutnick may have failed,"

OK, cool. So why did you take us on this unnecessary goose chase...? #1449095 #1452788

any editor worth their sold would cut this shit out… your tenuous connection is that a researcher received money years later from a company that once was involved in some potentially shady shit?

Despite what he lists on his CV, it appears that Hanson did a significant amount of his work for NASA, not as a direct employee, but rather as a contractor via the private company Sterling Software. Hanson does not publicly list his past employment with Sterling on his CV, but his publications from this period reveal his status as a Sterling employee while it contracted for NASA.

Quite often in cases like this, the causality runs ideas → money; not that money buys a researcher’s integrity.

the snark with which they suggest “independently” says a lot:

So yeah, you haven't convinced me that the tangentially-odd-strange potential origin story of the founder of Polymarket is in any way indication of a horrid, surveillance-state usurping of power -- via the dangerous element of prediction markets! #1518216** #1509638

There are much simpler, more obvious explanations than this conspiracyslop… some people genuinely believe prediction markets are a good idea for society, and thus (researchers, lobbyists, entrepreneurs) work downstream from that conviction. No infiltrating-institutions/nefarious-villain necessary.