John Delaney made the obituaries page of The New York Times when he died on Mount Everest, aged 42, after getting to within 50 metres of the summit. It was May 2011 and, in the first paragraph, Delaney was described as “an Irish businessman who founded Intrade, an online prediction market that allows customers to bet on world political, entertainment and financial events”. But that wasn’t true. Delaney wasn’t the Intrade founder. He wasn’t even close to being that, but he later became its driving force. And if the description of the prediction market he once ran sounds extremely like…

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