Netanyahu shook hands with Rubio but not with Trump
Netanyahu was photographed shaking hands with Marco Rubio and with Pete Hegseth on Tuesday and, so far, not with Trump
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Benjamin Netanyahu spent 82 minutes in the Oval Office on Tuesday. Nobody filmed it. He came in through a side entrance. There was no greeting on the West Wing steps, no White House readout, and no press conference. Polymarket's market on the meeting asks how long he and Donald Trump shook hands for, and a fifth of the money is on an answer measured in seconds.
Four photographs came out afterward, released by Netanyahu's office. One shows him shaking hands with Marco Rubio. One shows him shaking hands with Pete Hegseth. Two show him with Trump, sitting, looking at notes. None of the four shows the two men's hands.
The rules turn that into money. If a handshake is confirmed only by a photograph, the market pays an outcome called Photographed only. If it is caught on video from start to finish, it pays whichever bucket of seconds it lands in. If nothing surfaces by 11:59 pm on Friday, everything pays No Handshake.
So there are two questions here. Did they shake hands, and does a picture of it come out by Friday? In seventeen meetings since 2017, there is no record of these two men failing to shake hands, and the only documented time Trump left a head of government's hand hanging was Angela Merkel, in the Oval Office in March 2017. Netanyahu shook two other men's hands in that room on Tuesday.
On top of that, we already have the February precedent. Trump and Netanyahu met in a closed Oval Office on February 11 under the same conditions, with a reporter writing at the time that there was no photo op at all. That market resolved as photographed only because a still got out inside three days.
The only broadcast either man appeared in on Tuesday was Lindsey Graham's memorial, where Netanyahu sat four rows behind the American officials, and nobody reported them speaking.
Photographed only costs 9 cents and returns more than 11x by Friday night if a photograph appears and a video does not. A safer option would be No Handshake at 12.8 cents, offering a 681% return on investment. These are one of the true asymmetric bets right now in prediction markets.
This page does not constitute investing advice. Prediction markets and/or gambling may result in loss of funds. You are advised to conduct your own due diligence before taking any action.
