For those not familiar with the movie, Death Race 2000 it's a story of champion meets champion in a future car race across the country where hitting pedestrians scores points. The movie, produced by Roger Corman, has become a cult classic. It's stars, David Carradine and Sylvester Stallone went on to become Hollywood legends.
In the 2026 version we have a death race with a twist. There's an International Betting platform called Polymarket where users can bet on individual deaths, like heads of countries for example, and mass deaths caused by unnamed wars and violence globally.
A journalist for the Times of Israel newspaper, Emanuel Fabian, had published a short blog post reporting that an Iranian missile had struck an open area outside a Jerusalem suburb, harming no one... when the threats started coming.
According to The Washington Post Fabian received a chilling message on his phone.
"You have 90 minutes left to update the lie," a stranger said. "If you do this - you solve in a minute the most serious problem you have caused yourself in life. And you won't remember me anymore in a week," the message warned.
Other threats began to pour in threatening his life and family. He didn't know at first that his blog post triggered a dispute on the prediction market Polymarket on whether an Iranian missile would strike Israel on March 10th.
Apparently, his post scored a win for some Polymarket users who had bet against a missile strike occurring that day. The losers were angry and went after Fabian like crazed honey badgers. That didn't stop him from keeping the post however, and he reported the threats to the police.
Here's an example where an anonymous user on Polymarket won $400,000 betting on the ouster of Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro just hours before U.S. forces kidnapped him and took him back to the U.S. Bettors had ponied up $7 million dollars in a typical waging transaction for the site.
In Fabian's police report he shared a message written in Hebrew on WhatsApp by a user calling themself "Haim" who said if he caused him to lose his $900,000 bet, he would invest no less than that to finish him.
Polymarket is not open to American users, so another betting platform called Kalshi was created for American bettors. Users can bet on future events from elections to dictators being kidnapped, or assassinations of prominent figures.
As it Stands, the dystopian future that Death Race 2000 portrayed has been replaced by a reality much more deadly, where human lives worldwide have been reduced to betting chips.
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