LeBron James Wants Your Paycheck To Become His Paycheck, By Way Of Polymarket

The new Polymarket ad spot opens with LeBron James stepping onto an elevator and pushing a button labeled “SPORTS.” This is not some AI-extruded, near-enough visual representation of a generic basketball player of the stature of LeBron James. It is the actual LeBron James, newly a paid endorser of Polymarket, the marginally less sneering and brazen—but still apocalyptically corrupt—of the two big prediction markets. To get to the SPORTS floor, in the ad, actual LeBron will pass betting floors for culture, economy, and weather; above the sports floor are floors for politics and cryptocurrency. Polymarket is working on all of these areas, you see.

The elevator doors open and LeBron steps into chaos. It’s a scene yoinked visually and tonally from The Wolf of Wall Street—a trading floor bacchanalia, where, sure, there are desks and open laptops and a drop ceiling and fluorescent lights, but what is going on is unmistakably an insane party. The Wolf of Wall Street was queasily delighted with the picture it painted of piratical capitalism as a decadent blowout, and counted (I think) on its viewers to supply the distaste and disapproval. The Polymarket ad is (I think) what you get when a depraved, bottomlessly cynical, and terminally stupid culture discovers a compelling aesthetic template for enjoying the absolute hell out of separating suckers from their paychecks. Martin Scorsese gave viewers a bewildered Rob Reiner, aghast at his own son’s greed and lawlessness. Someone at Polymarket looked at everything happening around that and diagnosed, correctly, that America no longer wants a conscience. A Pinocchio-themed Polymarket ad would have Honest John and Stromboli high-fiving over a pile of gold while the pulped remains of the wooden boy crackle in the fireplace. There would simply be no Jiminy.

There are so many sell-outs present in this ad. John Leguizamo works a Jugs machine. Eli Manning rampages through it, throwing destructive JACKED-UP de-cleaters at anyone who catches a football, including Richard Sherman. Spike Lee is in there. Rajon Rondo is playing chess. LeBron says, “it’s a beautiful day to be great, y’all,” and then daps up Derek Jeter. Reggie Bush works a jumbled whiteboard, pointing a stick and shouting, “Trade, ball, money!” Emily Ratajkowski, conferenced in via live video, declares her approval, seductively. People are high-fiving all over the place. The only lyrics to the song playing over the ad are “Win, win win win win.”