$2.5 trillion worth of DraftKings gambling dreams.
The online sportsbook said its users sought to win that staggering sum in sports bets in 2025, an unusual metric for its business.
In an earnings letter this week, CEO Jason Robins said that its millions of users would have won $2.5 trillion if the online sportsbook had lost every single bet it took.
“Our total potential payouts across all open wagers, or capital at risk, was $2.5 trillion due to the multiplicative nature of parlays,” Robins wrote to shareholders. “We achieved this scale even though our sportsbook is only available to about half of the U.S. population.”
Parlays, which are highly addictive for many users, can involve a user betting just a few bucks to win a seven-figure sum. Such bets are virtually impossible to win, much like Mega Millions or Powerball.
This marked the first time the company framed its betting activity in terms of theoretical payouts (“capital at risk,” as Robins put it).
Of course, it would be impossible for users to win every bet they placed. This seems like a useless number for investors. So why did the company throw this figure out?
Prediction Markets Boom
The new shiny object in the U.S. online gambling space is the prediction market, a federally certified form of sports gambling—and also gambling on all sorts of other things, including politics and pop culture.
DraftKings and FanDuel each have a prediction market product. Both launched these to blunt the rise of Kalshi and Polymarket—Donald Trump Jr. backed firms with 11-figure valuations.
A traditional sports betting product like DraftKings Sportsbook typically measures activity by the “handle,” the total value of all bets it accepts. It pays out most of that in winning bets and retains the rest as revenue.
DraftKings said it handled $54 billion in bets in 2025, up 11% over 2024.
Prediction markets are often evaluated by their “volume,” which differs from handle. Volume is essentially the amount of money on both sides of a “yes” or “no” trade.
Consequently, volume is much higher, making prediction markets look more successful relative to traditional online betting apps. In many ways, we live in an era dominated by social media hype and retail investor mania.
A footnote in the DraftKings earnings letter states: “Total potential payouts, or capital at risk, is comparable to volume that predictions operators report.”
Are online gambling operators just throwing eye-watering numbers against the internet wall? Do they hope it supports their growth narratives amid fierce competition, declining public opinion of sports betting, and state gambling tax increases?
DraftKings stock just hit a multi-year low. FanDuel has experienced similar stock struggles.
According to Kalshi, it has recorded over $40 billion in total volume since 2021. That’s much less than DraftKings, which also has online casino gambling. Online casino games on prediction markets don’t exist—yet.
Another Way to Interpret DraftKings’ $2.5 Trillion
The $2.5 trillion figure is a counter-punch to Kalshi and Polymarket’s explosive growth narratives. But is it also useful for people concerned about gambling addiction?
I’m tempted to say yes, as it represents what people hoped to win from their bets. The majority of people who bet on sports think they can reliably make money from the activity. That is deeply troubling.
Americans won and lost billions of dollars on DraftKings in 2025, but people hoped for so much more. For me, the $2.5 trillion appears to be the value of that hope—misguided as it may be.
