I am sorta wary of a large bet pre-operationalization but this forecast seems kinda nuts to me ngl

@Ziddletwix Ah in the sentinel report it says

Forecasters estimated the probability that Elon Musk would significantly back a third party in the midterm elections to be 27% (range: 10% to 50%). This would involve committing significant sums of money (>$100M), making public endorsements comparable to those he made during the 2024 Presidential campaign, or even setting up a third party himself.

Would using that be a fine operationalization? Maybe add a like ‘or if it’s otherwise clear or consensus of credible reporting bc like if he helps his friend start a third party and funds it with 90M seems like the spirit is met

@Bayesian I think it would be fine enough if you want to resolve just based on your judgment of the title, but if you want some basic operationalization, i think the details provided in their full blog post are reasonable enough (& would help align this market with their forecast):

Forecasters estimated the probability that Elon Musk would significantly back a third party in the midterm elections to be 27% (range: 10% to 50%). This would involve committing significant sums of money (>$100M), making public endorsements comparable to those he made during the 2024 Presidential campaign, or even setting up a third party himself.

@Bayesian oops posted at the same time. but yeah imo it's nice to use the same operationalization as them so the forecasts align. but also fine to add some clause to clarify that these are just examples of what would count, and not strict criteria

@Ziddletwix

this forecast seems kinda nuts to me ngl

Can you say more?

Specifically, does it seem nuts now that a few days have passed since Musk more actively considered it, or nuts with the information at the time, and if so why.

@NuñoSempere Fair—when exactly were the forecasts made? It's probably sensitive to timing.

For context, not at all a politics guy, but I had fairly strong credence as of ~Thursday night (06/05) that Elon would very likely dial back this battle. Trying to avoid too much backwards projection (it's easy to say now what you supposedly believed then!), so to start from a direct Thurs night quote: "i'm gonna double down and guess they will at least a little bit patch things up. elon just doesn't have enough leverage here & has a lot to lose"—that was an offhand comment, not my thorough/comprehensive analysis, but it's a reasonable TL;DR of why I would have disagreed with a ~27% forecast at the time.

Trump has an enormous amount of leverage on Elon. The simplest reason why I do not think Elon will significantly back a third party is that Trump could (& likely would) respond by ruining Elon's professional interests in countless ways. A natural counterargument is "then why attack Trump in the first place?", and IMO the answer is simply that Elon is very capable of doing something unwise & self-destructive that he would soon regret, and that's exactly what he did. But to "significantly back a third party" would be to do something self-destructive not just for a single crazed afternoon on Twitter, but in a sustained way over many months. I do not believe that is likely.

If one thinks they have plausibly similar leverage over each other, then I think it would be reasonable (at the time) to take Elon at his word (& the given forecast was just 27%). But I don't believe there is anything symmetric here—I think Elon is very vulnerable and Trump is not (at least, from this angle), so Elon's tantrum was unwise and he would soon regret it.

(Some of that is probably a bit more precise than anything I thought at the time, but I do at least have some bets to point to here from last week where I did double down and expect Elon to want to patch things up, which for me is a pretty close inverse of this market, but I didn't make super concrete/large predictions, so maybe I'm filling it all in a little too much.)

@Ziddletwix That makes sense, thanks!