Polymarket has fired a top executive who was closely allied with CEO Shayne Coplan – the latest upheaval at the prediction market giant as it grapples with growing pains, The Post has learned.
Matthew Modabber – who has served as Polymarket’s chief marketing officer since January 2024 – has been ousted following an internal probe that began earlier this year over a string of headline-grabbing incidents that have sparked concern among the company’s investors, sources said.
Those included a reported scheme in which Modabber’s team allegedly built a fake webpage to promote staged videos of users making money off phony trades – a sham that was uncovered in a June expose by the Wall Street Journal and which triggered an investigation by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. The investigation is ongoing and no wrong-doing has been established.
Polymarket told the Journal at the time it was “committed to maintaining accurate, fair, and transparent markets,” adding that it plans to conduct a comprehensive audit of active promotional content.
One of the insiders said Polymarket is finalizing Modabber’s separation agreement and that both parties have maintained mutual respect for one another.
A Polymarket spokeswoman declined to comment and Modabber didn’t respond to The Post’s request for comment.
Modabber’s ouster was complicated by the fact that he has been a close confidante of 28-year-old Coplan, who became the nation’s youngest billionaire after Polymarket exploded in popularity following the 2024 presidential election, sources told The Post.
In conversations with The Post, insiders have described Modabber as an executive who makes impulsive decisions that have turned into public relations nightmares. But disciplining Modabber had proved tricky because of his buddy-buddy relationship with Coplan.
The duo were pals at the Beacon School – a prestigious public high school in Manhattan’s Hell’s Kitchen – and multiple sources say they’ve been “thick as thieves” during the meteoric rise of Polymarket, which offers wagers on everything from sports, the weather, the Oscars and celebrity breakups.
One source told The Post that Coplan was “irate” and even threatened to terminate members of the legal team that pushed for the firing – though he later conceded that parting ways with Modabber is best for the company.
Coplan didn’t respond to a request for comment.
According to sources, Polymarket’s board – consisting of Coplan, crypto investor Nick Tomaino, the powerful corporate lawyer Alex Spiro and an unidentified partner at Peter Thiel’s investment firm Founders Fund – ultimately concluded in recent weeks that Modabber was getting in the way of the company’s bid to shed is scrappy startup image as it eyes a possible IPO.
According to his LinkedIn page, Modabber was “employee #11” at Polymarket, building the company’s daily volume from $300,000 to “mid 9-figure daily volume via digital growth hacks”. He also claims to have “Built and led a 50+ person team across marketing, partnerships, and growth.”
But over the past year, an internal rift widened at the company between loyalists to Coplan and Modabber and other employees and investors who viewed Modabber as a loose cannon and a “huge liability” who was “wreaking havoc” on the company’s attempts to “grow up,” sources previously told The Post.
In particular, Polymarket insiders said Modabber hasn’t helped as Coplan previously raised concerns with his own behavior, including screaming at the office and spreading unsubstantiated sex rumors about the co-founders of archrival Kalshi.
“You can only have so many crazy people at the top of a company,” one of the sources said.
A Polymarket spokesman previously denied that Coplan has spread sexual rumors about Kalshi’s co-founders. The spokesperson added that Kalshi has stoked tensions between the two companies for years which has ultimately led to such allegations.
Polymarket’s legal team – led by Neal Kumar who joined Polymarket last year after more than eight years with elite white-shoe law firm Willkie Farr & Gallagher – had long been concerned about Modabber’s actions.
Company lawyers specifically told Modabber to quit the marketing scheme which advertised fake trades well before it was made public in June, according to a source.
At one point, sources said that some Polymarket employees had even grown suspicious of Modabber’s cozy relationship with internet influencers including Clavicular, known for his bizarre “looksmaxxing” advice that has included suggesting followers hit themselves in the face with a hammer to get a more chiseled jawline.
Polymarket has offered betting markets involving Clavicular – including which countries he would visit next.
Earlier this year, the pair were caught on video partying at a nightclub and Modabber appeared to stop mid-sentence when he realized their conversation was being recorded. It couldn’t be learned whether the episode contributed to Modabber’s firing.
Insiders said Polymarket’s review also examined Modabber’s reported use of a personal PayPal account – registered to an email for a Salad House, an Italy-based salad chain he co-founded – to pay influencers to promote Polymarket, often without disclosure of the paid partnership, as detailed in a June Politico article.
At the time, a Polymarket spokesperson declined to answer questions from Politico about the company’s strategy for partnering with influencers, its policies for disclosing those deals on social media, or why Modabber used a personal account for the transactions.
Investors have recently taken a more active role in attempting to steer Polymarket onto a more stable path. A Bloomberg report this week detailed how Peter Thiel’s venture firm Founders Fund last year insisted that Polymarket shore up financial controls before it wrote the company a check.
When Modabber joined Polymarket in 2024 he called Coplan his “dear friend” in a Linkedin post. “All gas, no breaks,” Modabber wrote in the post about Polymarket’s upward trajectory.
In August, Polymarket restructured its marketing team, bringing on the founder of the e-scooter startup Bird to head the division – effectively a demotion for Modabber, one of the insiders said.
The Post has sought comment from Polymarket.
