What if a systemically important tech CEO is assassinated?
A single-name founder shock is idiosyncratic, not systemic, so the real trade is a sharp but shallow drawdown in that mega-cap dragging the Nasdaq, with VIX up modestly and crypto (the 24/7 beta proxy) leading the bleed before equities open. Closest analogue is the brief Aug 2024 Nikkei/yen-carry VIX spike that round-tripped within days once contagion failed to appear. Forward angle: index concentration means one name now carries more S&P weight than any single stock did in prior decades, so the mechanical drag is larger than history implies.
Every number ships with its receipt — the odds, the range, the precedents, and a public grade at Reality Check. The statistical machinery that produces it is proprietary.
The butterfly cascade
How this trigger trickles across markets, left → right — the root shock, its first‑order moves, then the ripple effects. Drag any node; tap a market for its real price history.
Resolution timeline — how this probability is moving
Our model's odds (electric blue) over time vs the market's (Polymarket, amber), from the past toward the 1–3 years horizon. Each dot is a real macro event that nudged the probability — green pushed it up, red pushed it down. Tap a dot for the source. Loading the probability audit trail…
What it would mean
If this plays out, it is a risk-off shock. A systemically important tech founder/CEO is assassinated, shocking a mega-cap. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — Risk appetite ▼ · Geopolitical risk ▲ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.