Polymarket has fired chief marketing officer Matthew Modabber, a longtime friend of CEO Shayne Coplan, following an internal investigation, the New York Post reported on Oct. 22, citing people familiar with the matter.
Nobody has confirmed the move on the record. According to the Post, a Polymarket spokeswoman declined to comment, and neither Modabber nor Coplan responded to its requests.
Modabber had been chief marketing officer at the prediction market since January 2024. The Post’s sources said the company opened a review earlier this year into a run of public controversies that had unsettled investors. One insider told the outlet that Polymarket is now finalizing the terms of his separation agreement and that the two sides remain on respectful terms.
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What the Review Examined
Among the episodes the Post’s sources linked to the review was a promotion that allegedly relied on a sham website, set up by Modabber’s team, to show staged clips of users cashing in on trades that never happened. The Post said the scheme, which The Wall Street Journal exposed in June, triggered a CFTC investigation that remains ongoing with no wrongdoing established. Two senators also asked the CFTC to investigate at the time. One source told the Post that company lawyers had warned Modabber to end the promotion well before it became public in June.
According to the Post, the review also covered payments Modabber made to influencers from a personal PayPal account, often without the posts being disclosed as paid. Politico reported in June that the account sent more than $2.5 million to over 800 people between January 2025 and February 2026.
Coplan Pushed Back
Modabber and Coplan have been friends since their days at Manhattan’s Beacon School, and multiple sources described the pair to the Post as “thick as thieves.” One source told the Post that Coplan was “irate” about the effort to remove Modabber and threatened to fire members of the legal team pressing for it, though he eventually conceded that letting Modabber go was the right call for the company.
According to the Post’s sources, Polymarket’s board, made up of Coplan, investor Nick Tomaino, lawyer Alex Spiro and an unnamed Founders Fund partner, concluded in recent weeks that Modabber was an obstacle to the company presenting a more mature image as it weighs a possible IPO. In August, Polymarket had already reorganized its marketing group under the founder of scooter company Bird, which one insider characterized as a step down for Modabber.
The report comes days after Bloomberg said Founders Fund had made Coplan repay personal expenses before investing, and that Intercontinental Exchange had pushed him to hire a chief operating officer.
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