The FanDuel-DraftKings war reached unimaginable heights in 2015. In this exclusive excerpt from BILLION DOLLAR FANTASY, SI senior editor Albert Chen takes us behind the scenes to reveal how then FanDuel CEO Nigel Eccles escalated a massive spending war on a business that no one could believe was even legal. Adapted from BILLION DOLLAR FANTASY © 2019 by Albert Chen. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt on September 10. You can order a copy now on Amazon.
One early September morning in 2016, Nigel Eccles, the 43-year-old head of FanDuel—the fantasy sports company that over the last six months of 2015 had been valued at over a billion dollars, erupted into the largest TV advertiser in all of America, and was shortly thereafter deemed an illegal gambling operation by a half dozen states, while becoming the target of multiple Department of Justice investigations—emerged from a subway exit in lower Manhattan, squeezed through the morning rush hour crowd, and walked toward the grand entrance of the New York Stock Exchange.