The ongoing public feud between Musk and Trump continues with a twist.

A few days ago, Polymarket co-founder Shayne Coplan announced that Polymarket has become the "Official Prediction Market Partner" of social media giant X and its AI team xAI. The partnership will combine X platform data with Grok's analytical capabilities to provide real-time, context-rich, and data-supported insights to Polymarket's millions of global users.

Currently, Grok has been using Polymarket's data to predict events in the real world that involve uncertainty. However, it is not yet clear how this collaboration will transform the user experience on the X platform.

This partnership announcement coincidentally came on the second day of Musk and Trump's public social media spat. Just two weeks ago, the X platform had also explored similar collaboration opportunities with Kalshi—significantly, Trump's son Donald Trump Jr. is a senior advisor at Kalshi.

Given Kalshi's ties to the Trump family, this collaboration is seen not only as a product-oriented move but also as another deep dive by Musk into reshaping political relationships, expanding financial infrastructure, and advancing the vision of a "super app."

According to a press release from Polymarket, the two parties will introduce a series of jointly developed features and unique experiences.

The agreement outlines that X will provide data-driven insights to Polymarket, and Polymarket's prediction outcomes will feed back into the X platform, combining real-time interpretations from Grok and relevant X posts to achieve an "interpretable predictive data flow."

X CEO Linda Yaccarino stated that this collaboration will bring added value to X users already utilizing Polymarket: "Polymarket, through prediction markets, has achieved a high level of transparency and has become a crucial source of real-time information for many X users. We are excited to partner with Polymarket and bring our data and technology to their users through a series of innovative product integrations."

Currently, Polymarket's monthly trading volume has been steadily increasing post-election.

Why Polymarket?

Despite being one of the most popular prediction market platforms, Polymarket is currently banned in the United States. In January 2022, the CFTC deemed it to be illegally operating an unregistered trading platform and imposed a $1.4 million fine on the platform.

At that time, Vincent McGonagle, Acting Director of the CFTC's Enforcement Division, stated, "Market participants (such as Polymarket) should proactively engage with regulatory authorities to ensure market integrity, transparency, and provide customer protection under the Commodity Exchange Act and related regulations." The CFTC also issued a "cease and desist" letter to Polymarket, preventing it from legally operating in the U.S. market. This has made the recent partnership with X and Polymarket particularly noteworthy — especially considering that Kalshi has already been approved to legally operate a prediction market within the U.S.

The Rupture Continues

The ongoing conflict between Musk and Trump appears to be difficult to separate from this new partnership. As mentioned earlier, Donald Trump Jr., the eldest son of Trump, is a senior advisor at Kalshi, and this platform had previously discussed similar collaborations with X.

While such large-scale collaborations typically cannot be finalized in a day or two, the potential collaboration between Kalshi and X was indeed announced and canceled within a day.

In May of this year, Bloomberg reported that Kalshi was in discussions with xAI, including utilizing xAI's capabilities to provide "custom AI insights" to Kalshi. At that time, Kalshi CEO Tarek Mansour announced on social media, "I am excited to announce that Kalshi is about to collaborate with xAI to accelerate the prediction market towards the mainstream."

However, this joy was short-lived, as the related statement was deleted on the same day and has not had any follow-up since.

This led X to decisively turn towards Polymarket, which has not yet obtained U.S. regulatory approval, with strong symbolism in both public opinion and political contexts. In this context, why did Musk choose to cooperate with a "illegal" Polymarket?

In the short term, this may be just a retaliation against Kalshi's "turn towards Trump"; from a long-term perspective, it may be Musk's challenge to the existing regulatory paradigm and a strategic move to build a "borderless financial instrument" for X. He clearly does not want the path of his super app to be constrained by the rhythm of traditional financial compliance.

X's Financial Ambitions: From Payment System to Prediction Market

In fact, X has a long-standing connection to financial services. Back in 1999, Musk founded X.com, aiming to create a global online hub for financial transactions. Later, the company merged with Peter Thiel's Confinity, giving birth to PayPal. Despite Musk being ousted from the board, and PayPal eventually emerging as the main brand, he never gave up on the concept of "X." In 2017, he repurchased the X.com domain from PayPal, stating it had "emotional value." Five years later, he acquired Twitter and integrated it into X Corp, reigniting the former vision.

"If you only want to be a niche payment system, PayPal is more suitable; but if you want to take over the global financial system, then X is indispensable." This is a quote left by Musk in the "Musk Biography." He has never hidden his ambition to turn X into the "Western WeChat" — a super platform integrating social, payment, content, information, and identity.

The prediction market is a new puzzle piece in X's progress toward this goal. The data structure and user behavior of Polymarket complement X's platform's real-time sentiment, AI analysis engine Grok, and the potentially forthcoming XPay payment system. Musk clearly hopes that after incorporating Polymarket into the ecosystem, it can capture societal trends, public opinion trends, and even market sentiment from user-generated data, forming commercially viable and actionable financial products.

A joint release explicitly states that Polymarket's prediction results will be combined with Grok AI's semantic understanding capabilities to generate an "interpretable prediction data stream" for X users, providing data insights with real-time context. This provides a tangible example of the long-standing narrative of "AI×Finance×Social."

At the same time, X is accelerating its product expansion. On June 1, Musk announced the launch of the XChat system, featuring end-to-end encryption, automatic message destruction, file transfer in any format, and cross-platform audio and video calls, claiming it adopts a "Bitcoin-style encryption" architecture developed in the Rust language. Evolving from a social messaging tool into a comprehensive platform, X is rapidly approaching the structural prototype of WeChat.

Combined with previously launched content creator revenue-sharing mechanisms, protests against Apple's in-app purchase commission policy, and offering ad rebates to Twitter Blue users, it is evident that Musk is building a "from content to payment" closed-loop ecosystem. The prediction market is poised to become one of the earliest data product lines within this ecosystem to achieve profitability.

Elon Musk has stated that he "will never issue X's cryptocurrency," but this does not prevent him from continuing to advance on-chain financial functionality testing. From a payment logic perspective, the combination of a prediction market and cryptocurrency has natural advantages—trustlessness, quantifiability, composability—aligned with the Web3 toolchain. If in the future X launches a system similar to XPay, Polymarket may also become part of the embedded feature modules, aligning with the gradual trend of the macro environment becoming more crypto-friendly.

Polymarket Speculative Asset

As a blockchain-based prediction market platform, Polymarket has not yet issued a native token, leading many in the crypto community to anticipate its future token launch and airdrop.

UMA

At the same time, the market is also looking for directly related speculative assets. UMA is the core oracle for Polymarket, used to settle prediction market outcomes. Polymarket relies on UMA's Optimistic Oracle to ensure the fairness and reliability of market outcomes.

A collaboration between X and Polymarket could significantly increase Polymarket's trading volume and user base, thereby increasing UMA's adoption and demand. As trading volume on Polymarket grows, the demand for the UMA oracle will increase, potentially driving the staking and governance demand for the UMA token, further boosting its price.

Polycule

After Polymarket's trading volume rebounded, derivative projects developed around it as well.

Polycule is a streamlined Telegram trading bot designed to simplify trading on the Polymarket prediction market platform. On June 8, Polycule founder krish announced receiving a $560,000 investment on the X platform.

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